Money isn’t cheap anymore. For a few years now, higher interest rates and tighter liquidity have been squeezing margins across the European economy, and that pressure lands on your SME customers just as hard as it lands on you. Every euro they lose to a payment fee is a euro they now notice.
Which raises a question worth putting an actual number on: what is a card payment costing the businesses running on your platform and is that cost yours to solve?
The gap is bigger than most roadmaps assume.
We ran the numbers on a typical €3,000 B2B invoice, across the payment methods SMEs actually use today.
International cards land at around €97.75 per transaction. Standard EEA cards and wallet-based payments aren’t much better, at roughly €42–45. SEPA Direct Debit is cheaper but carries its own management overhead. A direct, bank-to-bank transfer initiated from software, Pay by Bank, comes in at as little as €0.29.
Put another way: on that same invoice, Pay by Bank can cost about 156x less than an international card transaction.
Cards and wallets run on a network, and every player in that chain takes a cut (usually a percentage of the transaction). On a business invoice of a few thousand euros, that percentage stops being background noise. Pay by Bank skips the network: it rides on bank transfer rails that already exist, with a flat or capped fee that barely moves as invoice size goes up.
That difference doesn’t stay abstract for long. If your platform’s “Pay now” button routes through a card, your customers feel that 2-4% fee every time they collect. If it doesn’t offer a payment button at all, they’re paying suppliers or collecting invoices manually, outside your product, which means less usage, less data, and less reason to stay.
A wave of well-funded, SME-focused accounting and finance platforms have scaled quickly across Europe over the past few years, and as they did, they raised the bar for what an “accounting tool” is expected to include.
Increasingly, that means moving the money, not just keeping the books. The players who embedded a cheaper payment rail early aren’t just offering a nicer UX, they’re capturing a fee-sharing or premium revenue line their competitors are still leaving on the table.
None of this requires you to become a payment institution. Pay by Bank is available through licensed providers, like Powens, which means the economics above (and the revenue opportunity that comes with them) are accessible without the regulatory lift of owning the rail yourself. The real decision isn’t whether to offer it — it’s how fast, and through what setup.
The cost gap is one part of a bigger shift. In the full report, we cover why bank payment APIs finally got good enough to build on, what changed with instant transfers and mandatory e-invoicing, and, importantly, where Pay by Bank has real limits and isn’t the right tool for every payment flow. If you’re weighing whether (and how) to add this to your product, that’s the part that actually shapes the roadmap decision.
Pay by Bank for SME Payments: Why 2026 Changed Everything breaks down the five structural shifts behind this move, the economics in detail, and where embedded payments do and don’t make sense.
[Download the full report →]