Pay by Bank Expands Across Nine European Markets via Zen.com

What happened

European fintech Zen.com has expanded its Pay by Bank offering, built on Mastercard Open Finance, so that it now supports both merchant payment acceptance and digital wallet top-ups. The expansion covers nine markets, according to reporting by Finextra.

The countries in scope are Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Lithuania. Pay by Bank lets a customer pay directly from their bank account rather than through a card, and Zen is now applying that route on the merchant side and for loading money into its wallet.

Pairing merchant acceptance with wallet top-ups means the same open-finance connection serves both ends of the transaction, rather than only one.

Why it matters

Checkout is where payment choice most often breaks down. When a shopper sees a familiar bank-based option alongside cards and wallets, the decision becomes a question of convenience and trust rather than of which card is to hand. Moving that option from a niche to a broadly accepted choice changes what merchants must design for, from the authorisation step to how clearly the bank-login journey is explained.

For wallet users, topping up from a bank account is a repeated, low-frequency action where friction tends to be felt keenly. Any reduction in steps or in the number of screens between intent and completion matters to how customers judge the service overall.

By the numbers

• 9 markets in the current expansion, spanning Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Lithuania.
• 2 use cases now live: merchant payment acceptance and digital wallet top-ups.

The Renascence take

Most coverage of open-banking payments will focus on the partnership and the country list. The more important question is whether the customer experiences the bank-based option as simpler or merely as a new logo at the till.

Pay by Bank succeeds or fails on the few seconds of trust-building that happen inside the bank's own authentication screen, not on the press release. Zen and Mastercard are effectively offering a new default in a market where shoppers are used to cards, so the real behavioural task is making the switch feel like the obvious, low-risk choice. Operators who accept the option should treat it as a service-design problem: map the full journey, remove any redundant steps, and make the fallback to cards effortless. Measure drop-off at the bank-login stage before celebrating adoption figures.