Tink upgrades payment stack with settlement accounts

Open banking platform Tink is upgrading its payment stack with the launch of settlement accounts.

The new feature aims to make the payments process smoother for merchants and says it enables real-time payment confirmation, instant refunds and payouts and integrated reporting.

In addition to Tink’s existing offering of “secure, cost-effective and frictionless” instant bank transfers, it is not extending into a full-stack open banking payments toolkit.

Tink aims to address the pain points of slow settlement times, fraud concerns, checkout friction and often high fees and operational costs with the new feature.

“The arrival of settlement accounts in the UK means that our partners can now enjoy the full time- and cost-saving benefits of real-time bank payments more easily,” Tink head of payments and platforms Tom Pope said. 

“We already enabled instant, seamless pay-ins that reduce friction for the end-user, and now we’re removing friction for merchants with the ability to receive a real-time payment confirmation and automate manual processes like issuing refunds and payouts or reconciling payments. 

“This has the potential to be a game-changer for merchants by unlocking the full value of open banking payments for key use cases like ecommerce and crypto.”

Starting in the UK ahead of a wider Europe roll-out in the coming months, the launch has kicked off with its first customer to use the new feature, crypto exchange Solidi.

Solidi’s co-founder and CEO Jamie McNaught said providing customs with a “completely seamless” crypto investing experience is key.

“Tink's open banking payments technology is the obvious choice for our customers – it takes our already instant onboarding experience and adds easy, frictionless payments – enabling anyone to invest in their first crypto in less than two minutes,” McNaught said.

He said that for the crypto exchange, the new features reduce integration, operational costs and time to market.

“Unlike other open banking platforms, Tink enables us to perform payment initiation and settlement using a single API – rather than multiple API's from different providers,” McNaught added.