Pay by Bank was pitched as the technology that would kill Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL). Instead, TrueLayer is absorbing it. Europe’s largest account-to-account payments network has folded Dutch consumer-credit fintech in3 into its platform and will launch BNPL as its first credit product, days before the UK’s first deferred-payment-credit rules take effect on July 15, 2026.
The move reframes the open-banking pitch. For years, Pay by Bank sold itself to merchants as the cheaper, instant alternative to cards and to the deferred-credit apps riding on top of them. By acquiring in3, TrueLayer concedes the more interesting point: a network that wants to replace Visa and Mastercard cannot offer only debit. It needs credit at checkout too. That is the real significance of the deal — not a BNPL land-grab, but the completion of a rail.
TrueLayer announced the acquisition of in3, which specialises in consumer credit settled over bank payments, on May 29, 2026; financial terms were not disclosed, per the TrueLayer newsroom. in3 continues to operate from the Netherlands while its technology and products are integrated, and the deal makes TrueLayer the only Pay by Bank network in Europe to offer both debit and credit at the checkout, according to Open Banking Expo. BNPL is the first credit product to go live, with longer-duration credit to follow later this year, PYMNTS reported.
The timing is not incidental. The UK Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) first wave of BNPL regulation takes effect on July 15, 2026, bringing deferred-payment credit into the regulated perimeter. That is a headwind for lightly regulated BNPL apps and a tailwind for a licensed open-banking network entering the same market — a reversal of the usual fintech pattern, where regulation slows incumbents and favours challengers. Here it professionalises the product just as an infrastructure player arrives with compliance already built in.
Rivals are not standing still. The card networks TrueLayer is targeting have hedged directly into open banking: Visa owns Tink and Mastercard owns Finicity, both account-to-account data players, while pure BNPL incumbents Klarna, Clearpay and Affirm now face an entrant that reaches the consumer through their own bank rather than a separate app. Account-to-account peers such as GoCardless, Yapily and Volt have built Pay by Bank debit flows but have not paired them with an owned credit book — the gap in3 fills for TrueLayer. None has publicly matched the debit-plus-credit combination at checkout.
TrueLayer framed the acquisition as the missing half of its network. “Pay by Bank has been successfully challenging card dominance at checkout for years. Today we are doing for credit what we have already achieved for debit,” said Francesco Simoneschi, chief executive and co-founder of TrueLayer. “With the addition of in3’s team and their deep expertise in consumer credit, we now have the people, the network and the products to build a truly independent European payments alternative to the card networks.” (TrueLayer)
For The Industry Spread’s core audience of brokers and trading platforms, the read-through is about settlement economics, not consumer shopping carts. Instant account-to-account funding has already moved into the trading stack — TrueLayer, for instance, powers instant deposits and withdrawals for CMC Markets, as we covered when CMC Markets went live with TrueLayer across the UK and Europe. A network that can now attach credit to those same rails changes what a “deposit” can be. The same convergence of payments and credit is driving the sector’s other big bets, from Klarna’s US bank-charter application to Adyen’s push into agentic checkout.
What happens next depends on adoption, not ambition. The card networks still clear the overwhelming majority of European checkout volume, and a debit-plus-credit Pay by Bank offer has to win merchant integrations one enterprise at a time. But the strategic logic is now hard to argue with: if open banking is going to be a genuine fourth rail alongside debit cards, credit cards and BNPL, it has to do everything they do. TrueLayer has spent an undisclosed sum to make sure it can — and picked the week the FCA rewrites the rules to say so.
The Industry Spread will track TrueLayer’s BNPL rollout and merchant adoption through the second half of 2026.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
