4 ranked
ACH, open banking and other bank-rail payments rather than cards. Cheaper per transaction, slower to settle, and no interchange.
Ranked by grade, then by average category score. Equal grades share a position — where our evidence does not separate two providers, neither does this list.
A bank-payments specialist built for recurring billing. GoCardless collects by ACH and other direct debit schemes rather than by card, with published, capped per-transaction pricing — but it processes no card payments at all, and merchant complaints about account freezes and slow support are persistent.
Melio is a US business bill-pay and accounts-payable platform founded in 2018 by Matan Bar, Ilan Atias and Ziv Paz, headquartered in New York with an R&D centre in Tel Aviv. It is not a card acquirer: instead of helping you take money from customers, it moves money out to your suppliers, letting you pay any vendor by ACH, cheque, wire or card even when that vendor accepts none of those, and syncing the result into QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite. Xero announced its acquisition of Melio in June 2025 and completed it on 15 October 2025 for US$2.5 billion upfront in cash and equity, with up to a further US$0.5 billion payable over three years. Xero's announcement put Melio at 80,000 customers, more than US$30 billion of payments processed in FY25 and US$153 million of FY25 revenue. Melio publishes its entire fee schedule, which is rare in this market and the single strongest thing about it. Against that sits a Better Business Bureau rating of F and a large, consistent body of complaints about accounts suspended mid-payment with funds already in transit.
An API for moving money between US bank accounts, founded in Des Moines in 2008 and one of the earliest companies to make ACH programmable. Dwolla does not touch cards at all: it does standard ACH, Same Day ACH, and instant payments over the RTP network and FedNow, behind a single integration. That is a genuinely useful thing to be able to buy, and Dwolla has been doing it longer than almost anyone. Two things should temper the enthusiasm. It no longer publishes any pricing — the pricing page now says only that terms are tailored to volume, rails and integration — and in May 2026 Dwolla was acquired by NMI, which is folding its capabilities into NMI's embedded payments platform. NMI says it will keep supporting existing Dwolla customers; neither company has said whether the Dwolla brand and product survive the integration. Build on it if bank-to-bank money movement is your requirement, but ask about the roadmap in writing.
Trustly is a Swedish open-banking payments company, launched in Stockholm in 2008, that moves money directly from a shopper's bank account to a merchant's — bypassing the card networks entirely. It is, on its own account, the largest pay-by-bank provider in the world by volume — a ranking no independent source confirms: its full year 2025 results report processed volume up 17.6% to SEK 1,059.0 billion, the first year it has carried more than $100 billion in total payment value, and it passed 120 million users in April 2026. Revenue, however, fell 12% on a constant-currency basis to SEK 2,427.7 million and it made a SEK 565.0 million loss after tax, a year into a 24-month transformation programme. It is regulated in Sweden and the UK, and in February 2022 the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority issued it a warning and a SEK 130 million fine for serious anti-money-laundering failings. It publishes no merchant pricing.