ISX Financial® partners with Mastercard to scale global account-to-account payments

Strategic partnership combines Mastercard’s global Open Finance connectivity and scale, with PaidBy®’s orchestration and settlement infrastructure to unlock international A2A payments

Beyond Borders: The Next Chapter for Open Banking

In June, at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, Mastercard announced a partnership aimed at one of the most persistent limitations in digital payments: making account-to-account (A2A) payments work across borders at commercial scale. The partnership brings together Mastercard and PaidBy®, the global A2A payment platform developed by ISX Financial®, part of the Xryma Plc group.

Open banking now moves billions of euros across Europe every month, yet most people may have used it without ever hearing the term. Traditionally, there were two ways to pay a merchant online: card payments or manual bank transfers. The former is instant for customer, but slow and expensive for the merchant, requiring the customer to hand over card data. The latter is cheaper, but also slow, error-prone, and impossible to reconcile automatically.

Open banking has emerged as a third option. Introduced across the UK and the EU under payment services regulation in 2018, it allows a licensed and regulated payment provider to initiate a payment from a customer’s bank account on their instruction, authorised inside their own banking application. At checkout, customers choose to pay from their bank account rather than by card, approve the payment in their banking app as they would any other, and are then returned to the merchant’s website. No card number is entered, and no card details are stored. For merchants, funds arrive directly into their bank account rather than through a card network. Transactional costs are comparable to card acceptance, however the payment is confirmed and settled in real time as a credit transfer across Europe and the UK, providing a substantial cash flow advantage to merchants compared with card processing.

Nevertheless, the promise of seamless A2A payments still largely stops at national borders. Merchants seeking to expand internationally continue to navigate fragmented integrations, multiple providers and complex settlement arrangements.

Mastercard and PaidBy® Introduce the Infrastructure for Global A2A Payments

The Mastercard and PaidBy® partnership introduces one of the first scalable cross-border A2A payment models. Mastercard provides the global connectivity, scheme-level trust, and scale required to make cross-border A2A payments viable for enterprise merchants. PaidBy® complements this with its proprietary orchestration layer, cross-border settlement infrastructure, dynamic currency capabilities, and merchant payout network. Mastercard’s Open Finance capabilities are being integrated directly into the PaidBy® platform.

The partnership will enable consumers to pay merchants directly from their bank accounts in their domestic currency, while allowing merchants in over 60 countries to receive settlement in their preferred local currency, with simplified reconciliation and next-business-day settlement across markets.

PaidBy®’s Robust Infrastructure Behind the Partnership

Built on ISX Financial’s regulated banktech infrastructure, PaidBy® operates under ISX Financial’s authorisation from the Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC) as a European Economic Area (EEA) Electronic Money Institution (EMI), with UK activity conducted under its Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) authorisation.

Designed as a full-stack payment solution, PaidBy® extends beyond payment initiation to support the wider payment, settlement and reconciliation journey. With PaidBy®, funds are received in a dedicated merchant account, while API-based notifications alert the merchant when the funds have arrived, rather than merely when the payment instruction has been sent. A finance team can therefore release goods or close a ledger on confirmation of funds received, rather than on a promise of payment.

PaidBy® also offers value-added capabilities intended to streamline payment operations, including automated refund management, business-intelligence dashboards, fraud-prevention tools and integration with businesses’ Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

“Open banking is at an inflection point, but its potential has been capped by geography”, said Nikogiannis Karantzis, Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Xryma Plc Group. “The technology to initiate a payment has existed for years. What has been missing is everything that comes after it: conversion, settlement, reconciliation, and refunds working as one system across more than one country.”

Built Inhouse, Designed for Global Commerce

ISX Financial® as part of the Xryma Plc Group, has been building the technology behind this model for more than a decade. Its infrastructure has been developed in-house and is protected by patents granted across Europe, the United States, Canada and Asia-Pacific.

The strategic partnership between Mastercard and PaidBy® comes amid accelerating global demand for faster settlement and reduced payment friction, as businesses increasingly seek alternatives to traditional payment rails for cross-border transactions.

It also perfectly demonstrates how regulated EMI and banktech infrastructure can be combined with global open banking to support digital commerce across borders and currencies serving businesses across multiple jurisdictions.

For businesses, the significance lies in replacing fragmented integrations and settlement relationships with a more unified cross-border payment model. For the wider payments industry, it represents a step towards an environment in which A2A payments can move beyond their domestic origins and operate as international infrastructure to serve digital commerce.

Visit PaidBy® Mastercard Website

Visit ISX Financial Website

About ISX Financial®

ISX Financial® is the trading name of Xryma Plc, a regulated, vertically integrated banktech group headquartered in Cyprus with operation centres in Cyprus, Lithuania and the United Kingdom. Authorised as an electronic money institution by the Central Bank of Cyprus for the EEA and by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, ISX Financial® is one of the first non-bank direct participants in the Eurosystem's T2 settlement system, settling in central bank money. Its proprietary platform, enables businesses to accept, move and settle funds across cards, bank transfers, open banking and central bank rails, spanning account-to-account payments (PaidBy® | Mastercard), transactional banking (ISX Money®), mass payouts (MassPay), card acquiring and issuing (ISXPay®), identity verification (Paydentity™) and core banking software (Probanx®).