Pay.com Partners with ClearBank to Launch Integrated Agency Banking for Global Merchants

Pay.com has partnered with ClearBank to integrate agency banking capabilities into its payment stack, enabling merchants to manage the full lifecycle from acceptance to payout. By adding virtual accounts and SEPA Instant connectivity, the collaboration addresses the fragmentation between payment processing and banking, providing fintechs and global merchants with a unified view of their treasury operations.

What was announced

Pay.com is integrating ClearBank’s Agency Banking infrastructure via a single API to extend its services beyond payment acceptance. This move allows merchants in more than 32 countries to access named multi-currency accounts and virtual IBANs (vIBANs) directly within the Pay.com platform. The integration focuses on solving the visibility gap that occurs when funds move from an acquirer to a separate banking institution, which often complicates reconciliation and adds operational friction.

The solution utilizes ClearBank’s virtual accounts to facilitate real-time account opening and management 365 days a year. This allows Pay.com to provide its customers—spanning ecommerce, digital media, and SaaS sectors—with 24/7 pay-in and pay-out capabilities. By leveraging SEPA Instant, merchants can move funds immediately rather than waiting for traditional batch windows. This connectivity reduces reliance on indirect payment chains, resulting in fewer intermediaries and faster settlement times.

Pay.com currently processes billions of dollars every month and maintains a historical uptime of 99.999%. By incorporating ClearBank’s regulatory rigour and API-native infrastructure, the company aims to provide a more resilient platform where acceptance, settlement, and outbound funds are all visible in a single interface. This structure enables Pay.com to see where funds are held for each customer without the cost of managing individual real accounts, while helping merchants operate with greater clarity and control over their payment operations.

"Every gap between those systems added latency, cost and complexity. It also created new places for revenue to leak out unnoticed. So, we built the whole stack on one platform: gateway, orchestration, acquiring, tokenisation and treasury,"

Tal Goldstein, Head of Acquiring at Pay.com.

The companies involved

Pay.com was established in 2020 with the objective of consolidating fragmented payment infrastructure that previously required merchants to assemble stacks from multiple providers. The company operates as a full-stack provider, offering gateway services, orchestration, and tokenisation alongside its own EU acquiring licence. This licensing allows the firm to route transactions through its own rails or third-party acquirers depending on the specific needs of the transaction, serving a diverse global client base that requires high-resilience payment systems.

ClearBank is a UK-based clearing bank known for its cloud-native technology and API-first approach to banking services. It provides clearing and agency banking services to a wide range of financial institutions, including banks, credit unions, and fintechs. Unlike traditional legacy banks, ClearBank does not offer retail banking or provide credit, focusing instead on providing the infrastructure that enables other companies to offer financial products. The bank has established itself as a critical partner for acquirers and payment processors looking for robust, real-time settlement and account management capabilities. By serving as a neutral utility, ClearBank allows its partners to maintain control over their customer relationships while benefiting from a regulated banking core.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has followed ClearBank’s expansion as a primary infrastructure provider for the fintech sector across 90 previous reports. This includes the bank's strategic moves to enhance real-time capabilities, such as when ClearBank Partners With Plaid to Power Real-Time Open Banking Payments in the UK. This previous collaboration highlighted the bank's role in facilitating instant account-to-account payments through open banking. While Pay.com is a newer presence in our coverage with three prior stories, their growth reflects a broader trend of payment firms seeking to verticalise their offerings. Our reporting has consistently tracked how the integration of banking and payment layers is becoming a standard requirement for merchants operating in the digital economy.

What this means

This partnership signals a shift in the merchant services market where "acceptance only" is no longer a sufficient value proposition for sophisticated global players. As merchants face increasing pressure to optimize working capital and reduce operational overhead, the ability to move funds instantly via SEPA Instant and manage them within virtual accounts becomes a competitive necessity. The industry is moving toward a model where the distinction between a payment processor and a bank is blurred for the end-user. This puts traditional legacy banks under pressure to modernize their API offerings or risk losing the treasury relationships of high-growth digital firms to more agile, infrastructure-led partnerships.