Europe-based Open Banking platform Tink has rolled out an upgrade to its payment stack with the launch of settlement accounts, a new feature that aggregates PIS settlement. Starting in the UK with a wider European roll-out to follow in the coming months of 2022, this launch enables real-time payment confirmation, instant refunds and payouts, integrated reporting, and more.

This means that, in addition to being able to benefit from Tink’s Payment Initiation Service (PIS) technology – which already delivers instant bank payments – merchants can now also benefit from a full-stack payments offering that enables fully automated refunds, payouts, and reconciliation. For merchants, settlement times can be slow, taking up to four days in some cases. Fraud rates are an ongoing concern, high fees and operational costs are associated with many payment methods, alongside friction at the checkout.

Tink’s new payments stack addresses these pain points directly. Merchants can now accept low-cost bank payments with integrated, real-time settlement and reporting – meaning you can send and receive money online faster while simplifying payment operations. Tink’s platform can accelerate merchants’ time-to-market since there’s no need for merchants to build and operate their own settlement or reconciliation systems, and manual processes for issuing refunds and payouts can be fully automated.

The first customer to use Tink’s settlement accounts feature in the UK is instant purchase crypto exchange, Solidi. Solidi already lets users start investing in crypto in less than two minutes, and by partnering with Tink, Solidi can take advantage of the core benefits of Open Banking payments – low transaction fees and reduced operational overheads – while continuing to offer instant account top-ups. Solidi can also cut out the manual work of reconciliation and troubleshooting user errors, since payment details are pre-populated.