Flywire, Trustly Expand Open Banking Payments in US and Canada

What happened

Flywire Corporation (Nasdaq: FLYW) has expanded its partnership with Trustly to extend open banking payment capabilities across the United States and Canada. The move allows payers to authorise large domestic and cross-border payments directly from their bank accounts, in their local currency, rather than relying solely on cards or wire transfers.

Under the expanded arrangement, Flywire's global payments platform will route eligible transactions through Trustly's open banking infrastructure, giving customers a more direct, bank-linked payment route for higher-value transfers.

Why it matters

Open banking payments give payers a faster, often lower-friction alternative to cards or bank wires, particularly for large-value transactions where card limits, currency conversion or wire-processing delays commonly cause drop-off. By embedding this option into its existing platform, Flywire is widening the range of payment methods available to its customers across sectors such as education, healthcare and travel, where cross-border, high-value payments are common.

For organisations processing large or international payments, the expansion signals a broader shift toward account-to-account payment rails as a mainstream option alongside cards, rather than a niche alternative — with implications for authorisation speed, reconciliation and payer experience.

The Renascence take

The headline here is infrastructure, but the real story is behavioural: large payments are where friction costs the most, because hesitation and abandonment scale with transaction size.

Most coverage of open banking partnerships focuses on the plumbing — bank connections, currency support, geographic reach. What gets missed is that large, cross-border payments are precisely the moments where payer anxiety peaks, and where a clunky redirect to a card form or a manual wire instruction can quietly kill conversion. Giving payers a direct, bank-authorised route in their own currency isn't just a technical upgrade; it's a trust signal at the exact point where trust is most fragile. Operators handling high-value, infrequent payments — tuition, medical bills, large travel bookings — should treat payment-method choice as a core experience decision, not a backend integration detail, and test whether offering this option actually reduces abandonment at the moments that matter most.