Beyond Borders: The Next Chapter for Open Banking
In June, at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, Mastercard announced a partnership aimed at one of the most persistent limitations in digital payments: making account-to-account (A2A) payments work across borders at commercial scale. Interestingly, its partner was not a Silicon Valley platform or a London challenger. It was PaidBy®, the global A2A payment platform developed by Xryma Plc, a banktech group headquartered and incorporated in Cyprus and authorised by the Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC).
Open banking now moves billions of euros across Europe every month, yet most people have used it without ever hearing the term. Traditionally, there were two ways to pay a business online: card payments or manual bank transfers. The former is instant for customer, but slow and expensive for the merchant, requiring the customer to hand over card data. The latter is cheaper, but also slow, error-prone, and impossible to reconcile automatically.
Open banking has emerged as a third option. Introduced across the UK and the EU under payment services regulation in 2018, it allows a licensed and regulated payment provider to initiate a payment from a customer’s bank account on their instruction, authorised inside their own banking application. At checkout, customers choose to pay from their bank account rather than by card, approve the payment in their banking app as they would any other, and are then returned to the merchant’s website. No card number is entered, and no card details are stored. For businesses, funds arrive directly into their bank account rather than through a card network. Transactional costs are similar to card acceptance, however the payment is confirmed and settled in real time as a credit transfer across Europe and UK, providing a substantial cash flow advantage to the business versus card processing.
Nevertheless, the promise of seamless A2A payments still largely stops at national borders. Merchants seeking to expand internationally continue to navigate fragmented integrations, multiple providers and complex settlement arrangements.
Mastercard and PaidBy® Build the Infrastructure for Global A2A Payments
The Mastercard and PaidBy® partnership introduces one of the first scalable cross-border A2A payment models. Mastercard provides the global connectivity, scheme-level trust, and scale required to make cross-border A2A payments viable for enterprise merchants. PaidBy® complements this with its proprietary orchestration layer, cross-border settlement infrastructure, dynamic currency capabilities, and merchant payout network. Mastercard’s Open Finance capabilities are being integrated directly into the PaidBy® platform.
The partnership will enable consumers to pay merchants directly from their bank accounts in their domestic currency, while allowing merchants in over 60 countries to receive settlement in their preferred local currency, with simplified reconciliation and next-business-day settlement across markets.
PaidBy®’s Robust Infrastructure Behind the Partnership
At the centre of the partnership is PaidBy®. Built on Xryma Plc’s regulated banktech infrastructure, PaidBy® operates under the group’s authorisation from the CBC as a European Economic Area (EEA) Electronic Money Institution (EMI), with UK activity conducted under its Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) authorisation. Designed as a full-stack payment solution, PaidBy® extends beyond payment initiation to support the wider payment, settlement and reconciliation journey.
With PaidBy®, funds are received in a dedicated merchant account, while API-based notifications alert the merchant when the funds have arrived, rather than merely when the payment instruction has been sent. A finance team can therefore release goods or close a ledger on confirmation of funds received, rather than on a promise of payment.
PaidBy® also offers value-added capabilities intended to streamline payment operations, including automated refund management, business-intelligence dashboards, fraud-prevention tools and integration with businesses’ Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
“Open banking is at an inflection point, but its potential has been capped by geography”, said Nikogiannis Karantzis, Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Xryma Plc. “The technology to initiate a payment has existed for years. What has been missing is everything that comes after it: conversion, settlement, reconciliation, and refunds working as one system across more than one country.”
Built in Cyprus, Designed for Global Commerce
Beyond its significance for Xryma Plc, the strategic partnership between Mastercard and PaidBy® represents an important milestone for Cyprus and its financial services sector. Xryma Plc has been building this for more than a decade: technology developed in-house, protected by patents granted across Europe, the United States, Canada and Asia-Pacific, and a workforce of 150 (August 2026) on the island in engineering, compliance and operations roles. Xryma Plc’s latest partnership demonstrates that a Cyprus-headquartered, regulated EMI and banktech group can develop payment infrastructure designed to serve businesses across multiple jurisdictions.
The island’s financial reputation has been built largely on being a place where business is domiciled, with wealth and value routed through Cyprus. A company that develops regulated payment technology in Cyprus and exports it to merchants across Europe, the UK and globally represents something different: value through intellectual property created in Cyprus, rather than value created outside Cyprus and transit routed through it.
