Flywire and Trustly extend open banking to North America

Flywire's Pay by Bank expansion into the US and Canada marks a significant step in open banking's move from European test bed to

By Disrupts Editorial Team Tue, 25 August 2026

A bright conference room features a long wooden conference table and grey chairs facing large windows that overlook a city skyline with skyscrapers, a river, and distant mountains under clear daylight.

Flywire (Nasdaq: FLYW), the Boston-based payments enablement and software company, has extended its partnership with Swedish open banking specialist Trustly to cover the United States and Canada. The move brings Trustly's Pay by Bank capability to North American payers making high-value payments to Flywire clients worldwide, settling via ACH in the US and Pre-Authorised Debit in Canada. The two companies have worked together since 2017, initially across European markets, and the expansion marks the first time their combined infrastructure has been deployed at scale in North America.

The core proposition is account-to-account payment without the friction of manual bank-detail entry. Payers authenticate using their existing online banking credentials via Trustly's interface, which performs a real-time balance check at the point of authorisation. For cross-border transactions, Flywire says it manages funds during the post-settlement return window to reduce reversal risk. The release claims the workflow eliminates routing-number entry errors, reduces non-sufficient-funds returns, and provides payers with processing timelines and price transparency before authorisation completes.

From European proving ground to North American rollout

Open banking in Europe has been structurally mandated since the EU's revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) came into force, creating a relatively uniform technical and regulatory environment. North America is a different picture. The US operates without a federal open banking mandate, though the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Section 1033 rulemaking is advancing rules that would require financial institutions to share customer-permissioned data with third parties. Canada's own open banking framework has been in development for several years and remains at an earlier stage than the UK or EU equivalents. Flywire's decision to build out Pay by Bank now, ahead of regulatory compulsion, is a bet that enterprise demand in education, healthcare, and travel will pull adoption rather than wait for a regulatory push.

Kate Moran, Vice President of Global Payments at Flywire, noted that the company is "applying the open banking infrastructure we've successfully scaled across Europe to North America, enabling our clients to confidently offer their payers a proven experience." The quote is substantive: it frames the expansion explicitly as a technology-transfer exercise rather than a greenfield build, which reduces execution risk but does not remove the regulatory uncertainty that still surrounds open banking data-sharing in both US and Canadian markets.

Cross-sector read-across: education, healthcare, and the high-value payment stack

Flywire's client base spans education institutions, healthcare providers, and travel operators, each characterised by high average transaction values, complex compliance requirements, and significant friction in legacy wire and ACH workflows. The same sectors are under simultaneous pressure from rising interchange costs on card networks and increasing demand from enterprise treasury teams for payment certainty and real-time reconciliation. Open banking's account-to-account rails, which bypass card networks entirely, offer a structurally lower-cost route for these high-value flows.

The broader capital and partnership landscape is moving in the same direction. Stripe, Plaid, and a growing cohort of infrastructure players are competing to make bank-pay a credible alternative to card acceptance in B2B and high-value consumer contexts. Trustly's positioning as a settlement-layer specialist, handling the full payment journey rather than acting solely as a data connector, differentiates it from API aggregators in the space. For Flywire's approximately 5,300 clients across more than 240 countries, the North American rollout also raises the prospect of a genuinely unified global pay-by-bank experience, though regulatory fragmentation will continue to require jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction compliance work for the foreseeable future.

The second-order question is what the expansion signals for the broader fintech infrastructure stack. If enterprise verticals with high average transaction values adopt open banking at scale in North America, card network volume in those segments faces structural erosion. That is a slow-burn dynamic, but one that investors in payment infrastructure companies are beginning to price into long-duration valuation models.