Flywire expands Trustly partnership to deliver open banking payments across US and Canada

What happened

Flywire Corporation has expanded its partnership with Trustly to bring open banking payments to customers in the United States and Canada. The expanded integration lets payers authorise large domestic and cross-border payments directly from their bank accounts, settling in their local currency rather than routing through card networks or wire transfers.

The move builds on Flywire's existing relationship with Trustly and extends open banking rails — which let payers securely link and pay from their bank account with a few clicks — into two markets where Flywire serves clients across education, healthcare and other sectors that regularly process high-value payments.

Why it matters

Large payments — tuition, medical bills, B2B invoices — are exactly where payment friction does the most behavioural damage. Card limits, manual bank transfers and unfamiliar cross-border processes create hesitation, abandonment and support calls at the highest-value moments in a customer journey. Open banking reduces the number of steps and the cognitive load between "I want to pay" and "I've paid," which is a direct lever on completion rates for large-ticket transactions.

For service design, the interesting bit isn't the technology but what it removes: manual account-number entry, currency-conversion uncertainty, and the trust gap that comes from typing sensitive details into a form. Authorising a payment straight from a familiar banking app is a smaller behavioural ask than any of the alternatives — and smaller asks convert better, especially when the amount at stake is large enough to trigger loss aversion.

The Renascence take

It's tempting to read this as a plumbing story — two payments companies extending a partnership into new geographies. The more useful read is about where friction actually lives in high-value transactions, and who benefits from removing it.

Most organisations chasing "seamless payments" focus on the checkout screen, but the real conversion battle for large sums happens in the payer's head before they even open the app — the fear of getting a cross-border payment wrong, the uncertainty over exchange rates, the dread of a failed wire. Open banking doesn't just remove clicks, it removes the specific anxieties that cause people to abandon big payments at the last step. Operators serving high-ticket customers — universities, hospitals, B2B suppliers — should treat payment-method choice as a trust decision, not a technical one, and audit whether their current options are quietly taxing customers with exactly the kind of friction this partnership is designed to strip out.