Bringing Open Banking to WordPress – pay for WooCommerce orders from any bank account

Harnessing the power of Open Banking with NatWest Payit™ and WordPress.

Project overview

NatWest recently partnered with Elementary Digital to bring their Payit™ platform to WordPress stores. Using Open Banking technology, Payit™ is designed to be the simplest, most convenient, and secure way to pay online using just a bank account.

The brief

Our team was tasked with creating a simple-to-install and easy-to-use WordPress plugin. This would integrate the most popular ecommerce plugin on the WordPress platform, Woocommerce, with NatWest’s innovative payment solution. As a business requirement, they also wanted something that could go into production quickly and handle high volumes of transactions.

The solution

We created a bespoke solution that securely integrates with their payment API while providing a smooth user experience. To ensure that the plugin was in line with their visual and user experience guidelines, we worked closely with NatWest to implement their brand guidelines for Payit™. The plugin enables customers to buy via their mobile banking app, no matter what bank or device they are using. Our solution gives merchants a fully featured and flexible eCommerce platform that is simple to integrate with existing stores and allows them to begin accepting payments straightaway.

The bank selection screen on NatWest’s Payit™ platform.

Open Banking API

One of the main benefits of using the Payit™ platform is improved security for online payments. Customers can use any account or device to pay for goods online, knowing that their financial information is protected by the latest security measures. This can give customers peace of mind when making purchases and encourage them to shop online more frequently. For store owners, our solution brings the full security benefits of NatWest’s platform, based on Open Banking, to the WordPress ecosystem.

The challenge

As a distributed plugin, the solution needed to be compatible with different versions of PHP, WordPress and WooCommerce. We implemented a full automated testing suite to ensure that the plugin works seamlessly across different versions and configurations. This helps to ensure that the plugin is reliable and easy to use for all WooCommerce users. We future-proofed the plugin by setting up automatic tests against new releases of WordPress and WooCommerce. This also allows us to test new features in isolation and ensure that everything works as designed.

The stats

91%

Open Banking

Of bank accounts with access to Open Banking in the UK.

5,000,000

Transactions

Number of transactions processed by the Payit™ platform (August 2022).

£200

Value

Average transaction value on the Payit™ platform.

The people that made it possible

Jon
Kelly
Liam

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