The short answer
Open Banking has two regulated roles and they are not variations of each other.
An account information service provider reads. It receives a token that lets it pull your balances and transaction history from your bank. It cannot move a cent.
A payment initiation service provider writes. It instructs your bank to make a payment on your behalf. It never holds your money — the payment goes directly from your account to the destination — but it can cause money to leave.
The distinction determines what you are agreeing to, what the worst case looks like, and what you should check before granting access. Many apps hold both permissions and present them in a single flow, which is where people lose track of what they granted.
What an AISP can actually see
An AISP’s access is defined by the scopes on your bank’s consent screen, and those are broader than most people expect.
Typically included: account identifiers and balances, and transaction history — frequently up to 24 months of it, retrieved in the first sync. That history contains the counterparty of every payment, the merchant descriptor, the date and amount, and often a category. It is not a summary; it is the raw feed.
What that feed reveals is the substantive privacy question, and it is considerable — employer, landlord, health providers, religious or political donations, and the shape of your relationships. What your bank transaction history actually reveals covers the inference side.
Two structural points matter more than the scope list.
Access is ongoing, not a snapshot. A consent typically permits repeated access for its duration, so the app keeps pulling new transactions until the consent expires or you revoke it. Open Banking consent expiry explained covers the renewal cycle.
Revocation is not deletion. Withdrawing consent stops future reads. It does nothing to the two years of history already pulled, which sits under the app’s own retention policy. Deleting that requires a separate request.
What a PISP can actually do
A PISP initiates a payment from your account, with your authentication, to a destination specified in the request.
The important properties:
- It never touches the money. Funds move from your account to the payee directly. There is no intermediary balance, which removes an entire category of risk compared with a provider that holds your funds.
- You still authenticate at your bank. The payment requires your own Strong Customer Authentication, in your bank’s app or interface, showing the amount and the payee.
- It cannot see your accounts unless it also holds AISP permission. The licences are separate.
- It may be a single payment or a standing mandate. The second kind is the one to read carefully.
A single-payment PISP authorisation is quite safe. You approve one specific amount to one specific payee, at your bank, on a screen your bank controls. A recurring mandate is a different proposition, because you are approving a rule rather than a payment, and the amounts that follow may vary within limits you should be reading.
Why paying by bank transfer differs from paying by card
Open Banking payments are increasingly offered at checkout, often with a discount, because they are dramatically cheaper for the merchant than card interchange. They are also mechanically different in a way worth understanding before you choose.
A card payment is a pull. You give the merchant permission to request money, and the card networks operate a dispute process — chargeback — with defined grounds including goods not received and goods not as described. That process is a scheme rule, and it is a genuine consumer protection with a long history.
An Open Banking payment is a push. You instruct your bank to send money. Once sent, it is sent. There is no chargeback mechanism, because there is no scheme operating one. If the merchant does not deliver, your recourse is against the merchant directly, plus whatever protections apply to authorised push payment fraud in your jurisdiction — and those vary considerably, with reimbursement rules that are stronger in some European markets than others.
That is not an argument against using them. For paying a trusted counterparty — topping up an account you own, paying an invoice from a supplier you know — the push model is fast, cheap and clean. It is an argument for keeping cards for purchases where delivery risk exists: a first order from an unfamiliar merchant, anything paid well in advance, anything expensive.
The discount offered for paying by bank transfer is real, and so is what you are trading for it.
Checking which one you are dealing with
Read the consent screen, not the app’s description of it. Your bank’s screen is the operative legal document and it states the scopes. If it lists account information and you expected a one-off payment, stop.
Check the register. Every European regulator publishes authorised firms with their permissions listed. Account information and payment initiation appear as separate entries. How to check an app is a licensed AISP walks through it, and the same method reads the PISP permission.
Identify the entity, not the brand. Many apps operate as an agent of a licensed firm, or use a licensed third party as a technical service provider. The name on your bank’s consent screen may not be the app’s name — and the name on the consent screen is the one holding the token.
Note the duration and the scopes. Both are on the consent screen. A budgeting app requesting 90-day rolling access to transaction history is behaving normally. The same app requesting payment initiation permission needs a reason you can articulate.
The thing to watch for
The pattern worth catching is a combined flow — an app that presents payment initiation and account information as one seamless “connect your bank” step, where you are focused on completing a payment and grant ongoing read access without registering it.
Nothing about this is illegitimate. The consent screen discloses it, the licence covers it, and the app may have a perfectly good product reason. But the two permissions have different consequences and are worth two different decisions, and the interface is rarely designed to prompt for the second one.
The habit that prevents it: when your bank’s screen appears, read the scope list before the button. It is five seconds, it is the only moment the actual grant is displayed, and it is the last point at which declining costs you nothing.