Pay by Bank arrives in German shop systems: secupay integrates Mastercard’s open banking payment
The payment service provider secupay now offers Mastercard’s Pay by Bank via Shopware, WooCommerce, JTL and its own API. The customer confirms the transfer in their own online banking, and the merchant receives a payment without the card networks.
What happened
The payment service provider secupay announced on 3 September 2026 that it is adding Mastercard’s open banking solution Pay by Bank to its offering. Merchants reach the method through the existing connections for Shopware, WooCommerce and JTL as well as through the secuconnect API, without having to build a new integration. Technically it is a payment initiation service under PSD2: the customer confirms the transfer directly in their online banking via TAN or banking app, and sensitive payment data does not travel through the shop. As first users, secupay names the investment platforms Conda Capital and Piece Germany as well as the art marketplace Art 4 You. According to secupay’s management, the Mastercard solution now reaches around 95 per cent of banks in Germany — and it was precisely that coverage which was missing for years, which is why open banking never arrived in the German checkout.
Who it affects
Online merchants with high basket sizes, where the percentage card fee really hurts: furniture, art, electronics, investments, B2B orders. Also shops with chargeback problems and everyone who has had to offer prepayment because the card was too expensive or too risky for them.
Assessment
Account-based payment at checkout has been announced in Germany for ten years, and so far it has failed at a single point: bank coverage. If every fifth customer gets stuck in the payment process because their bank is not supported, the method is not a revenue channel for the merchant but a source of abandonment. That is why coverage is the real news here, not the integration.
Even so, that is no reason for merchants to switch off the card. Anyone offering Pay by Bank gives up the perceived buyer protection of the credit card and in return gets a payment that is removed from the card network and its chargeback routes. It gets interesting as a second rail: two methods at checkout mean two price lists, and the provider that used to have no competition sits differently at the table in the next terms discussion. You just have to do the maths honestly — a method with a low fee and low usage saves nothing.
What to do now
- Check in your own shop what share of revenue runs through baskets above 200 euros. Only there does the percentage card fee bite hard enough for a second method to pay off.
- Roll out Pay by Bank not as a replacement but as an additional option, and measure the conversion of both routes separately for three months.
- Take the result into the terms negotiation — a comparison of two real cost paths is the only argument that reliably moves prices in payments.