I tried Yolt Pay recently. As I understand it, this is Yolt’s implementation of an Open Banking Payment Initiation Service.
What I assumed would happen is I would need to authorize use of Yolt Pay with my bank once and from then on I would be able to make payments without leaving the Yolt app. However, every single time I made a payment I was transferred to my bank’s app to authorise the payment.
Is this a constraint of how payment initiation services have to operate (and therefore every app that implements payment initiation services will have to behave this way) or is it Yolt’s choice to implement it this way? Either way, I’m not sure I see the point. If I have to be transferred to my bank’s app everytime I want to make a payment, I might as well initiate the payment from the bank app.
Clear as mud, but I think this suggests they’re hoping to change this after beta.
We’re not quite there yet, but we’re working on it. In this early stage of Yolt Pay , you’ll be able to initiate payments within Yolt. You’ll then be redirected to your bank to confirm the payment. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be redirected back into Yolt where we’ll let you know if your payment went through successfully. Don’t worry if you get an error screen – you can try again!
I would describe that as a constraint even if that is how it is supposed to work. A requirement (constraint as I would call it) to authorize every single payment on the bank’s app makes 3rd party payment initiation entirely unappealing to me. That wasn’t how I assumed it was going to work. I no longer see the point of 3rd party payment initiation services.
I’m not sure what you mean by app to app payments. It’s not terminology I’ve seen others use. Is it what I am referring to as 3rd party payment initiation?
Any chance you can record the flow and share it here? It would be nice to see how they have implemented it. I am on Barclays, so can’t access the feature + still struggling with the profile identification.
Yolt Pay screen shown below. You enter a transfer amount (field not shown on the screenshot - it’s just a bit higher up the screen), pick one of your accounts that support payment initiation using drop-down list (I am using a Santander account here), then enter where you want to transfer to. This can be done manually or you can use the contacts icon to pick from a list of stored accounts. This stored account list includes the other acounts you have connected to Yolt and also seems to include payee info read from some or all of my connected accounts. Once something is selected it will populate the fields on the Yolt Pay page.
Once you click pay you then get transferred to the bank’s app and what happens here seems bank-specific. With Santander (shown below) there are several of screens to go through. For HSBC it’s just an authentication screen followed by a confirmation screen.
