Open Banking Payments provide a disruptive alternative to online payments, but what does an actual payments journey look like for a customer? If you have been following the fire.com blog over the last number of weeks, you may have noticed that we have quite a number of Open Banking Payments initiatives, from the Irish Guide Dogs Day through to our own Open Banking Terminal. These are exciting developments, both for us as a company or enterpise, but also within the larger Open Banking sphere. However, quite understandably, the concept of Open Banking and Fire Open Payments is still an unknown to the vast majority. That is the inspiration for this blog post – to shed some light around the Fire Open Payments journey and, hopefully, prompt more of you readers to consider trialling the process yourselves!

The Open Banking journey with Fire Open Payments

For this particular journey, I am on an e-commerce website and want to purchase a baguette from my local bakery – Tasty Bakery.

Similar to any e-commerce flow I select my products, and go to the “Checkout”. After entering my Delivery Details I then proceed to payment. At this point most of us would be used to fumbling around for our purse/wallet, then squinting to transcribe the card number into the website.

However, with just a tap of a button, I am redirected to the Fire Open Payments journey.

I select my bank of choice from the list.

I bank with Natwest, so I’ll select them from the list. I then consent to the payment, which will redirect me to my Natwest banking app.

I will be prompted to log in to my Natwest app to authorise the payment. This part of the journey will be dictated by the bank itself in terms of how it designs their app flow.

This is an important part of the journey; it ensures that the customer who initiated the payment is the account owner and not attempting to make a payment fraudulently.

After scanning my fingerprint, I select the account I wish to pay from.

A quick tap of the ‘Account Selected’ button and I can authorise the payment.

Thankfully my account balance just stretches to cover the payment and I will be able to complete the purchase!

I will then be returned to my browser where I see that the payment has indeed been successful. I can request an optional receipt before returning to the merchant website, where I will hopefully be informed that my baguette will be delivered fresh from the oven.

Conclusion

There you have it, I’ve managed to make a payment through Fire Open Payments. The main benefits to my mind is the flow itself and the enhanced security. I never had to divert my attention from my phone to complete the payment; everything is contained within my browser and banking app. Having the flexibility to choose the account to pay from, coupled with a live view of my account balance was a bonus too.

This process provided that added assurance by authenticating the payment using my fingerprint – I was confident that no one could fraudulently create a payment on my behalf without access to my thumb! Also, if you’re security-conscious like me, I never save my card details within the browser, so I regularly find myself leaving the comfort of my couch to retrieve my debit card to enter my card number. This step was completely bypassed through Open Banking.

If you are curious about trying the process yourself, scan the QR code below or head over to https://www.fire.com/donate to make a small donation to Calcutta Connect and trial the Open Banking experience.

Setup your account today and get started with Fire Open Payments

Eoin Kent is a Product Analyst at Fire with experience working on Open Banking solutions – from APIs to UI/UX and everything in between.