ZEN.COM and Mastercard Expand Pay-by-Bank Across Nine European Markets

ZEN.COM has expanded its pay-by-bank capabilities across nine European markets through a partnership with Mastercard Open Finance. This move provides merchants and consumers with a streamlined alternative to traditional bank transfers, reflecting the growing demand for account-to-account payments and the ongoing maturation of Open Finance infrastructure within the European fintech ecosystem.

What was announced

ZEN.COM is utilizing Mastercard's European payment platform to facilitate pay-by-bank experiences for both merchant payment acceptance and digital wallet top-ups. As of September 2026, the service is operational in Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and Lithuania. The integration is designed to reduce the friction typically associated with manual bank transfers and invoice payments by allowing customers to pay directly from their existing bank accounts. For merchants, this provides a payment method that is gaining significant momentum across the continent.

The rollout allows ZEN.COM merchants to offer this direct payment option alongside existing methods like cards. By using Mastercard's Open Finance infrastructure, ZEN.COM has consolidated what would typically be multiple regional integrations into a single technical framework. This enables the fintech to scale the service across diverse regulatory and banking environments within the Eurozone and beyond. The functionality is available to all merchants using the ZEN.COM platform and applies to all users looking to fund their ZEN.COM digital wallets in the specified regions. The launch supports a broader ambition to simplify the payment process for both businesses and consumers by leveraging secure, scalable infrastructure provided by Mastercard.

"Pay-by-bank is becoming one of the fastest-growing ways to pay in Europe, and with Mastercard Open Finance we brought it live across nine markets through a single integration,"

Łukasz Neska, Chief Growth Officer at ZEN.COM

The companies involved

ZEN.COM is a European fintech firm that operates as a provider of payment acceptance, digital wallet solutions, and broader financial services tailored for both business entities and individual consumers. The company focuses on integrating various financial functions into a single ecosystem, aiming to streamline how users manage and move money across borders. Mastercard, the global payments technology corporation, provides the underlying Open Finance infrastructure for this expansion. Through its European payment platform, Mastercard is increasingly positioning itself as a facilitator of account-to-account transactions, moving beyond its traditional role as a credit and debit card network.

The partnership involves Mastercard’s Open Finance division, which is tasked with developing secure and scalable infrastructure to help fintechs and banks deliver new payment experiences. Valerie Nowak serves as the EVP and Head of Open Finance for Mastercard APEMEA. By offering a single integration point for multiple European markets, Mastercard aims to reduce the technical barriers for companies like ZEN.COM that are looking to scale their services internationally without managing disparate regional banking infrastructures or multiple payment pipelines.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has previously tracked ZEN.COM’s efforts to modernize the European payments landscape through its ongoing relationship with Mastercard. In June 2026, the publication detailed a significant step in their collaboration with the report ZEN.COM Integrates Mastercard Click to Pay for Seamless One-Click Online Shopping. That integration focused on the Mastercard Click to Pay standard, which was designed to eliminate the need for manual card entry and passwords during the online checkout process. This latest expansion into pay-by-bank services demonstrates a broadening of their technical cooperation, shifting from the optimization of card-based transactions to the enablement of direct bank-to-bank transfers through Open Finance protocols.

What this means

This announcement signals that pay-by-bank is transitioning from a niche fintech experiment into a mainstream commercial reality. By leveraging Mastercard’s infrastructure, ZEN.COM is bypassing the fragmentation that has historically hindered Open Banking adoption in Europe. For the wider industry, this puts pressure on traditional payment gateways to offer similar account-to-account (A2A) capabilities or risk losing volume to more efficient, lower-friction alternatives. It also raises questions about the long-term dominance of card schemes; while Mastercard is providing the rails here, the transaction itself moves away from the traditional interchange model, suggesting a strategic pivot by the major networks to own the infrastructure of A2A payments before competitors can.