How Spred works

Spred is a simple and secure payments solution that enables all sorts of ways for you to receive money.

Enough talk! Want to give it a go? Scan this QR code on your phone to make a £1.00 payment to Spred (UK banks only)

Generating test payment...

Spred starts a payment flow through our secure Open Banking partner. Their tool provides a simple and secure authorisation process (with connections to hundreds of banks), and gently guides your customer through every step on this surprisingly brief journey:

Your customer:

Chooses their bank from a list
Authenticates with their bank
(totally secure using industry-standard Secure Customer Authentication)
Gets redirected back to Spred or your website

Spred uses that single-use authorisation to set up the payment directly from their bank to yours.

Neither Spred nor our Open Banking partner handle funds. It's direct between you and your customer, just how it should be! And the transaction can't be replayed without the customer re-authorising.

(This works differently for subscriptions, so the customer isn't forced to re-authenticate every cycle.)

You get notified of the payment via email and optionally via a Webhook.

The customer hasn't given over card details to any third-party and the funds are usually in your bank account within a few minutes.

We haven't formally tested it, but it definitely feels quicker than paying by card!

As you can see, making a payment with Spred is fast, easy and secure. Is it time you got some Spred?

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Refunds, Chargebacks and Fraud

Refunds

Refunds are an important part of any payment experience. As Spred utilises Open Banking to enable payments, transactions are bank to bank, and often settle within minutes or even seconds. You can easily perform full or partial refunds directly from your Spred account.

Chargebacks

Chargebacks are a peculiarity of card-based payments, and occur when a customer disputes the charge made to their card. Chargebacks cost merchants £/€millions each year in chargeback fees, let alone the lost income from the reversed payments and potential inability to recover other costs such as any physical goods and their shipping and handling.

Thanks to Open Banking, Spred doesn't suffer from chargebacks as there are no cards involved in making a purchase and customers must authenticate with their bank using Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). This qualifies payments in a way that card payments can never be.

However, this doesn't prevent disputes being raised. These must be settled between the merchant and the customer (and their respective banks). We want Spred to help here too, and we'll soon have a dedicated dispute management tool available in your Spred account.

Handling Fraud

Due to the way that Open Banking operates, Strong Customer Authentication helps validate and verify that the person attempting to make a payment is exactly who they claim to be. This means that there’s virtually no opportunities for fraudulent payments to occur, and means that you’re not paying additional fees to cover for others losses.

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