Why this matters
What is VRP, in two sentences
VRP vs direct debit
Direction of authorisation
Direct debit is an authorisation given to the recipient to pull money from the payer's account. The consumer hands control to the merchant. If you want to cancel, you ask the merchant or run a dispute through the bank. VRP is an authorisation granted by the consumer through the banking app, visible in that app with concrete limits and an end date. You can revoke it any time with one click in your banking app, without asking the merchant.
Settlement speed
Direct debit runs in batch mode, settled across business-day cycles. VRP runs through Faster Payments instantly, in seconds.
Dispute model
Direct debit in the UK carries the "Direct Debit Guarantee", under which the consumer can demand an immediate refund from the bank in case of dispute, and the bank must execute that refund within one day. On the surface this is a consumer protection, but it has large consequences for merchants: every direct-debit charge is "conditional" during the dispute window. VRP keeps strong consumer protection (clear authorisation, easy revocation, transparent limits) but the dispute resolution model is different and more predictable for the merchant.
VRP vs the card saved at the merchant
Cost
A card in a "card-not-present" transaction (i.e. online, as opposed to a physical terminal) generates fees of 1.3% to 3.5% of transaction value, depending on country, regulation and card type. Visa and Mastercard between them process USD 24 trillion a year, largely on this kind of recurring volume. VRP via open banking, in its target market form, is expected to cost a flat fee in the tens of pence per transaction, regardless of amount. That is a difference of an order of magnitude.
Card lifecycle
Replacing a card (theft, expiry, bank change) means every subscription stops working. The consumer has to update card details at each service individually. Visa and Mastercard introduced "Account Updater" as a partial fix, but it only works partially and only for selected merchants. VRP is tied to the bank account, and the bank account does not change because a card is replaced.
Lack of consumer visibility
After a year of subscriptions across Spotify, Netflix, AWS, ChatGPT, Cursor, Notion, ten SaaS services, most people have no idea how much is being pulled from their cards monthly. Banks have no good way to show this aggregated across all cards. VRP, because it is a permission visible in the bank's app, automatically generates a central registry of "what and to whom I have agreed to pay". In the banking app you see the list of all active VRPs with limits and end dates.
Structural dependence on US card networks
Every card transaction generates a data trail that leaves Europe. Every interchange fee flows out to Visa, Mastercard, issuing banks, and is distributed across infrastructure outside European jurisdiction. This is a strategic problem that Brussels is watching with growing concern, and one that drove, among others, the Wero / EPI initiative and EuroPA (covered recently in our piece on BLIK).
What exactly launched on 2 June
- ✓ Energy, telecoms, water (variable monthly bill, the ideal VRP use case)
- ✓ Regulated financial services (loan repayments, insurance premiums, BNPL)
- ✓ E-money institutions (wallet top-ups)
- ✓ Local and central government (council tax, public charges, fines)
- ✓ Charities (regular donations)
The scheme declares 75% coverage of UK current accounts already in Wave 1. A customer of practically any large UK bank can authorise a VRP today. Wave 2, planned for the second half of 2026, extends scope to general e-commerce including SaaS subscriptions, streaming and subscription retail. That is the moment VRP starts competing with Visa and Mastercard in their core territory.
Technology notes from launch
TrueLayer launched "Bank on File" as its brand for VRP in the recurring context, positioning it directly against "card-on-file" as a naming alternative. First clients: IG Group (brokerage), InvestEngine, Trading 212, East Lothian Housing Association (residential rent). GoCardless ran the first recurring Pay by Bank transaction for Jellyfish Energy back in March 2026 in test mode. Full production rollout was one of the first in the scheme. Token.io, one of UKPI's founding shareholders, is plugged into the full breadth of the scheme and offers cVRP as a built-in feature of its PIS platform for UK clients.
Scale context
For scale: VRP already accounted for 16% of all open banking transactions in the UK in 2025. The bulk of that volume comes from "sweeping VRP", automated transfers between a customer's own accounts (for example surplus from current to savings). Sweeping VRP has been available since 2022 as a CMA regulatory mandate for the 9 largest banks. Now, with UKPI, the sector moves into commercial VRP: payments to merchants, where previously only cards and direct debit existed.
What this means for Poland
VRP is not a tech feature, it is a new payment scheme
UKPI has a rulebook, a commercial model, operational standards, a Managing Director (Richard Koch), a board, a dedicated legal entity. It is not an extension of an existing API; it is a separate scheme with its own economics. In Poland we are only just starting this conversation, in the context of transposing PSD3 and PSR, whose EU trilogue closed in November 2025. PSD3 creates the regulatory conditions for VRP-like mechanisms, but there is no Polish equivalent of UKPI yet.
Polish banks could technically support VRP today
Every bank running a PIS API already supports the concept of an authorisation session. Extending that to VRP requires defining a long-running consent (mandate) and a pull schedule within that consent. This is not rocket science; it is a commercial agreement about who pays what, who is liable for what, and what the SLA model looks like. BLIK has had recurring BLIK payments since 2019, covering exactly this use case for a narrow category (telecoms, insurance). VRP is the same idea, but as an open standard across all banks, not a closed PSP product.
Cards still dominate Polish recurring
A PKO BP customer paying for Netflix pays from a Visa card. An mBank customer paying for Spotify pays from a Mastercard. That money flows out to the infrastructure of the global card networks. A Polish VRP, if it existed, would keep this cost layer in the country, exactly the way BLIK kept the e-commerce cost layer onshore. We are talking about billions of zloty per year in retail subscription alone.
The Polish market had an epic success with BLIK in the single-transaction layer. The next logical step is the "recurring on file" layer. The UK has just shown that it is feasible, regulatorily and commercially. This is an opportunity for the Polish banking sector, for PSPs, for regulators, and equally for independent PISP fintechs, to build a Polish answer. But that opportunity will not wait forever. The UK sector just showed that this kind of project can be delivered in eleven months. Poland, with its BLIK ecosystem, its regulator, and its fintech industry, is in a much better starting position than the UK was a year ago. The question is who picks this up. From my own point of view, as someone building products in the PISP layer, VRP opens a category that does not exist in any scalable form on the Polish market today: subscription on open banking. Concretely: the first Polish SaaS company to offer VRP-like billing instead of a card has a real cost case against Visa- and Mastercard-based competitors. All it needs is good infrastructure on the PISP side. The UK currently has a four-year technology-and-regulation lead over the rest of Europe in A2A subscriptions. But it is not an unbridgeable lead. The technology is known, the business models are written down, the UKPI rulebook is publicly available as a template. What is missing is political will, sector coordination, and a concrete industry consortium. The same things BLIK had in 2014 with its six founding banks.