Nikogiannis Karantzis, Managing Director and CEO of Xryma Plc, shares how Open Banking enables cross-border A2A payment settlement through the PaidBy® | Mastercard solution.
Open Banking has been around for almost a decade, yet account-to-account (A2A) payments still trail cards in most markets. What has held A2A back?
Open Banking was built for peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, not as a merchant settlement service. The industry added a payment initiation (PI) layer on top of a fragmented settlement model. The PI process typically only notifies merchants that a payment started, similar to card authorisation. However, a merchant needs to know funds have arrived and finalised, as with a card settlement report, something most A2A providers don’t offer.
Open Banking was designed for domestic ecommerce: one market and currency; hence, it could not compete with cards on cross-border commerce. Also, it launched without the post-payment layer of card schemes: refunds, disputes, and recalls.
In this context, what is the PaidBy® | Mastercard partnership about and how does it approach the problem?
PaidBy® | Mastercard is a full-cycle Open Banking payment platform. It initiates, processes, and settles payments into a merchant’s account. It confirms received funds and enables partial and full end-to-end refund management through one unified system and accountable party. The consumer pays from their bank account, and the merchant receives real-time confirmation, as credit transfers, across Europe and the UK. The PaidBy® platform, live with merchants since 2022, including Wix.com, is now extended through the Mastercard partnership.
We were deliberate about design and didn’t build an Open Banking product to rival other providers, but as an alternative to cards. Cards won by making the process invisible to the consumer.
Offering an alternative means enabling at least the same payment process for merchants, posing a different engineering problem: minimising consumer friction from user experience through to currency settlement.
Many providers focus on PI. We have built around settlement and own the entire chain: PI, instant rails processing, central bank clearing, optional FX (for cross-border), settlement into merchant accounts, confirmation, notifications, and refund management.
The Xryma Group is a direct participant in the Eurosystem’s T2 RTGS and TIPS via Latvia’s and Lithuania’s central banks, one of the few non-bank institutions with that access level. Central bank money settlement is the fastest form of cross-border interbank settlement. Payment certainty and reconciliation are built-in, with funds typically arriving the same day, often within two hours.
This direct access remains rare. It carries governance, compliance, safeguarding, and wind-down obligations that most electronic money or payment institutions cannot meet, and regulatory rigour is part of a trusted system.
The Mastercard partnership aims to scale cross-border A2A payments. How does paying in one currency and settling in another work?
The consumer pays in their own currency; the embedded FX converts it dynamically into the merchant’s currency, and the money settles the next business day in the exchanged currency. We treat currency conversion as core infrastructure. Consumers pay, and merchants receive in their own currency, with no conversion to manage.
We also facilitate a ‘refund reserve’ to buffer currency fluctuations, available for refund drawdowns. It currently originates in EUR and GBP and settles into over 100 local currencies. Mastercard brings Open Finance connectivity and global reach; PaidBy® brings orchestration, FX, and direct settlement on central bank rails. Together, we remove Open Banking’s geographic constraints, and, with cross-border capability and settlement certainty, A2A becomes a true commercial alternative.
Refunds, disputes, and consumer protection are the objections most often raised against A2A when compared with cards. How do you address them?
A2A launched without the post-payment layer, so merchants were right to hesitate to adopt it. Xryma’s PaidBy® built in post-payment from day one: a card equivalent with full or partial refund management, dispute handling, and FX-hedged currency buffering, all native to the platform. Domestically, PaidBy® holds both the merchant account and settlement chain, so refunds are one system’s instruction, not a request routed across multiple providers. Cross-border, our ‘refund reserve’ manages currency fluctuations
Instant payments demand instant controls. Behavioural analytics and transaction profiling run on the rails in line with Verification/Confirmation of Payee requirements. For merchants, this means speed, higher conversion, fewer disputes, and a refund process they can operate.
What does implementation involve for merchants, PSPs, and platforms considering A2A, and where do you see the strongest early use cases? What is next on the roadmap?
Implementation requires one relationship. The platform is API-first, with merchant-branded checkout and automated onboarding via Paydentity™, for remote verification. A merchant account, settlement, FX, payouts, and reconciliation sit within the same regulated ecosystem.
The strongest early fit is wherever consumer trust or settlement certainty is a commercial advantage: cross-border ecommerce and travel; regulated verticals, like FX and trading platforms, where payout speed matters; marketplaces that need embedded collection and disbursement; and PSPs that want to offer A2A without building proprietary settlement infrastructure.
We’re working on inbound initiation currencies from Q4 2026 and expansion with Mastercard into new verticals and regions, including push-to-card payouts. We’re also preparing for Bank of England RTGS and CHAPS access, which extends the central bank settlement model to GBP.
Outdated architecture created fragmentation, regulatory pressure, and real-time expectations. The future needs a unified, real-time, cross-border infrastructure where initiation, FX, settlement, refund management, and reconciliation operate as one system. PaidBy® | Mastercard offers exactly that. Visit the PaidBy® | Mastercard website here.
This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Account-to-Account Payments Report 2026, which features insights into global trends, technologies, partnerships, and the next phase of the A2A evolution. Access the full report to understand where the A2A payments ecosystem stands today and what’s next.
About the author
Nikogiannis Karantzis is the founder and Managing Director/CEO of the Xryma Plc Group. He holds qualifications in engineering (University of Western Australia), law, and business (University of Melbourne). Nikogiannis has over 30 years of experience across several sectors, including payments, electronic money, online media, anti-money laundering (AML), defence, and secure communications.
About Xryma
Xryma Plc is a regulated banktech group operating dual-authorised electronic money institutions in the EEA and the UK, as a direct participant in RTGS via both the ECB and BoE in EUR and GBP. It owns its full payments stack, from Open Banking initiation to settlement at central banks, delivering accounts, A2A payments, FX, payouts, card services, and core banking technology within one platform.
