TrueLayer Raises $27M to Scale Pay by Bank Network

What happened

TrueLayer, the European open banking and Pay by Bank network, has raised $27 million in a funding round led by Italy's CDP Venture Capital. The investment is earmarked for scaling TrueLayer's Pay by Bank proposition, the account-to-account payment method that lets shoppers pay directly from their bank account rather than using a card.

The round, reported by Finextra, adds to TrueLayer's existing open banking infrastructure business and signals continued investor appetite for account-to-account payment rails across Europe, with CDP Venture Capital's backing pointing to particular interest from the Italian market.

Why it matters

Pay by Bank sits at the intersection of payments infrastructure and digital transformation: it routes transactions directly between bank accounts via open banking APIs, bypassing card networks. For merchants and platforms, that can mean lower processing costs and faster settlement; for consumers, it offers an alternative checkout flow that increasingly competes with card and wallet options. Fresh capital for a network operator like TrueLayer suggests the category is moving from early adoption toward wider commercial scale across European markets.

For leaders overseeing payment experience, this is a reminder that checkout is not a solved problem — it remains a live battleground for conversion, trust and friction reduction, and new funding into account-to-account rails will keep pressure on incumbents to simplify their own payment journeys.

By the numbers

• $27 million raised by TrueLayer in the round led by CDP Venture Capital, dedicated to scaling its Pay by Bank network.

The Renascence take

Funding rounds for payment infrastructure rarely make headlines for their drama, but they quietly reshape what "normal" checkout looks like for millions of customers. The real story isn't the capital — it's the behavioural shift Pay by Bank is betting on: convincing people to trust a bank-to-bank transfer as much as they trust a familiar card button.

Every new payment rail is really a trust experiment disguised as infrastructure. The operators who win won't be the ones with the cheapest transaction fees — they'll be the ones who make an unfamiliar payment flow feel as effortless and reversible as a card tap. Merchants evaluating Pay by Bank should treat the checkout redesign, not the cost saving, as the main event: test it on low-stakes purchases first, be explicit about refund and dispute handling, and give customers a visible fallback until confidence in the new flow is earned.