by Serguey Shinder
In 2025 we added a pay by bank option to our web checkout. The customer picks their bank, approves the payment in their banking app, and the money moves straight from their account to ours. Our fees on those orders were about a third of what cards cost us, and by the spring of 2026 roughly a fifth of our web orders were paid that way.
Then people started sending things back. The refund screen in our order system had one button, and it sent a refund to the card the customer had paid with. For a bank payment there was no card. The button failed, and our returns team improvised. They rang customers and asked for their account details, which is precisely the conversation fraudsters imitate, and keyed the refunds into our banking portal by hand. Within a month two of them had gone to the wrong account because of a mistyped digit.
Disputes were stranger. A customer who has paid by card and never received the goods calls their card issuer, and a process that has run for decades takes over. A customer who paid by bank had no such route. They came to us, and when we were slow, to the ombudsman. We had never had a disputes process of our own, because we had never needed one. The card networks had been running it for us without our noticing.
That is the thing I expect to matter for the next ten years. Cards did a great deal of work that no business thought of as a feature. Refunds went back to wherever the money came from. Disputes had a referee. The payment itself told you something about who was paying. Fraud checks happened somewhere upstream. As payments spread across bank transfers, wallets, instalment plans and whatever arrives next, each of those services becomes somebody's job again, and for most businesses that somebody will be them.
We now treat the refund as an operation in its own right rather than as the undo button on a card payment. Every order records how it was paid and what the route back is, and refunds for bank payments go through our payment provider to the original account, so nobody types a sort code. We wrote a disputes process with published timescales and an owner. And before any new way to pay goes live, we go through a list of nine things a card used to do for us and write down, for each one, who does it now.
The first time we used that list, on an instalment provider in August, we found three answers that were nobody.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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