Plaid launches ‘Payouts’ product in UK

Open Banking payments platform Plaid has introduced a new product to the UK called ‘Payouts’, following the launch of ‘payment initiation’ for its UK customers last year.

Plaid’s payment initiation product enables users to make instant bank payments within their app, with Kraken, Moneybox and PensionBee among its customers.

In a blog post written by Sanjna Verma, product manager at Plaid, and published today (10 December), she wrote: “One of the main questions we’ve heard from customers is whether Payment Initiation supports withdrawals and refunds.

“To help continue to drive adoption for Open Banking payments and make it a full stack payment solution, today we’re excited to announce a new product, Payouts.”

The new offering means that users can “seamlessly and instantly” make withdrawals and refunds from the app or service that they are using, by opening and pre-funding an e-money account, from which funds can be sent to users requesting a payout.

Plaid also announced it is rolling out a feature for payment initiation, called ‘Payment Confirmation’, which provides a notification when a payment is received in a merchant account.

Verma confirmed that both its payouts product and payment confirmation feature are available as of 10 December.

In October, Plaid launched a ‘payment partner ecosystem’ comprising around 50 US and European companies, including Square and Checkout.com, with the aim to boost account-to-account payment transactions.