Pay by Bank: the secure card payment alternative for high value automotive transactions
Pay by Bank: the secure card payment alternative for high value automotive transactions
The most secure card payment alternative for high value automotive transactions is Pay by Bank. It moves money straight from the customer’s bank account to the dealer’s, and the customer approves it inside their own banking app, so no account or card number is ever shared.
For a dealership taking a £500 deposit, a card works fine. For a £35,000 balance on a car that leaves the forecourt today, the card starts to cost you. Fees rise with the price. Card limits get in the way. And when the sale happens over the phone or online, fraud and chargebacks become a live risk.
This guide explains where cards fall short on big ticket vehicle sales, how Pay by Bank works for automotive dealerships, and how to keep cards for the payments where they still make sense.
Why are card payments risky for high value car sales?
Cards were built for everyday spending. A vehicle purchase stretches them in four ways.
Fees scale with the sale. Card processing is charged largely as a percentage of the transaction, so the cost on a used car worth tens of thousands is many times the cost on a service invoice. Across a year of sales, that margin adds up quickly.
Card not present payments carry more fraud. When a buyer reserves a car from home or pays the balance before collection, the dealer never sees the physical card. That is where stolen card details get used, and where disputes start.
Chargebacks land after the car has gone. A customer, or a fraudster using their card, can dispute a payment weeks later. By then the vehicle is registered in someone else’s name and parked on someone else’s drive.
Credit limits get in the way. Plenty of buyers simply cannot put a full car price on one card. They split it across cards, or fall back to a manual bank transfer.
That fallback has its own problems. A traditional transfer means sharing account numbers and sort codes by email or phone, which opens the door to invoice redirection fraud. Your accounts team then has to match the payment by hand, and the customer waits while someone confirms the money has actually arrived.
How does Pay by Bank work for car dealers?
Pay by Bank is an open banking payment. The customer pays from their bank account through their own bank’s app, and the dealer gets confirmation in real time. With Prommt, it sits inside the same payment request your team already sends.
- Your salesperson sends a payment request by SMS, email or chat for a reservation, deposit or full balance.
- The customer opens a branded payment page carrying your dealership’s name and logo.
- They choose Pay by Bank and select their bank.
- Their banking app opens, and they approve the payment with the same login or biometrics they use every day.
- You see the payment confirmed instantly, with live status tracking and reporting across every site and department.
- Web and App payments. With a single API, the Prommt checkout can seamlessly integrate bank payments to your Ecommerce web and app payments, delivering even greater savings, at scale. No lengthy implementation is necessary, our clients are quickly collecting efficient and cost effective payments online within days.
The customer never types an account number or sort code, and your team never has to chase a transfer. For the buyer it feels quicker than a bank transfer. For you, the deal can close and the car can leave the same day.
How much can dealers save by moving away from cards?
Our client, Motorpoint, saved more than £100,000 in under eight months after adding Pay by Bank through Prommt. Heather Whitmore, Head of Finance Operations at Motorpoint, credits it with cutting merchant fees and making payment collection simpler for the team.
The savings come from the fee structure. Card costs grow with every pound of the sale, while Pay by Bank avoids card scheme fees and interchange altogether. The bigger the average transaction, the more a dealer keeps.
Wilsons Auctions, another Prommt client, saw the same pattern. Most of their payments are high value, so they use Prommt’s Payment Orchestration to route each transaction by amount. They set a card limit: below it, buyers can pay by card or Pay by Bank, and above it, payments go through Pay by Bank only. This avoids the percentage fees that make cards so expensive on large transactions, while keeping card payments available where they make sense. Paul Clarkin at Wilsons says it removed substantial costs from the business and slotted straight into their new website.
The experience of Toomey Motor Group, also a Prommt client, highlights how rapidly adoption can grow when Pay by Bank is offered alongside existing payment methods. Toomey kept its card and bank transfer options and added Pay by Bank through Prommt, in partnership with Payit by NatWest. Customers pay on a payment page carrying Toomey’s own brand, straight from their banking app. The share of payments made this way grew from about 5% to 40%, and Brand Manager Wesley Thorne reports the dealership took over £5 million in a single month.
The bigger change for Toomey was certainty. Staff get real time confirmation of funds, so they can hand over the keys without waiting on a transfer to clear, even out of hours. Fellow Brand Manager Gary Rumsby says the customer journey has improved “tenfold”.
You can check all cases studies here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the safest way to take a car payment remotely?
Pay by Bank. The customer approves the payment in their own banking app, no card or account details change hands, and the dealer gets real time confirmation before releasing the vehicle.
Is Pay by Bank the same as a bank transfer?
The money moves account to account in both cases, but Pay by Bank removes the manual steps. The customer never copies an account number or sort code, so there is no chance of paying a fraudster’s account by mistake, and the payment is matched to the sale automatically.
Can a Pay by Bank payment be charged back?
Card chargeback schemes do not apply to Pay by Bank, because no card is used. The customer’s bank authenticates the payment directly, which takes away the dispute risk that comes with card not present sales.
Is there a limit on how much a customer can pay by bank?
Each bank sets its own payment limits, and they vary by bank and account type. Customers paying very large sums may need to check their limit with their bank before the handover.
Do customers need to download anything?
No. They open the payment request on their phone or computer and approve the payment in the banking app they already use.