The strange thing about the future of payments is how little anyone wants to think about paying.
For decades, cards won because they became almost invisible. Remember sixteen digits, then stop remembering them. Tap the plastic. Save the details. Add the card to a phone. What looked like technological progress was really a steady removal of thought from the moment money left your account. Open banking matters because it is beginning to do the same thing without necessarily needing the card in the middle.
You can already see that shift in places where money moves frequently and speed matters. Retailers want cheaper checkout routes. Banks want customers using their apps. Betting customers comparing the best online bookies increasingly encounter account-to-account deposits alongside the usual debit-card options. None of this feels revolutionary because it is not supposed to. Payment technology usually wins when the person paying stops noticing the technology.
This is why saying open banking will “replace” cards is both too dramatic and not dramatic enough.
Cards are not about to vanish. They remain familiar, widely accepted and exceptionally good at solving a basic problem. Credit cards also offer something open banking cannot simply reproduce: access to credit. Yet the more interesting contest is not whether Visa cards disappear from wallets. It is whether card networks remain the automatic route for every digital transaction.
That assumption is weakening.
The numbers are becoming difficult to dismiss. The Financial Conduct Authority says more than 16 million people now use open banking in the UK, while open banking payments grew 53% during 2025. Its account of the growth of open banking payments also points to variable recurring payments, which allow people to authorise flexible repeat transactions directly from their accounts. That begins to move open banking beyond the occasional bank transfer and towards territory traditionally occupied by cards and direct debits.
The attraction for businesses is obvious. Card payments carry infrastructure, intermediaries and fees that merchants have spent years treating as a cost of being online. Account-to-account payments offer the prospect of moving money more directly. The attraction for consumers is subtler. Nobody wakes up hoping to use an API before breakfast. They care that checkout works, that the payment arrives quickly and that they do not have to hunt for a card they left in yesterday’s trousers.
PostPlace’s discussion of fintech and the rise of digital-first banking makes the wider point that financial technology has been removing friction from transactions that once required slower banking systems. The interesting word there is friction. Payments are full of tiny annoyances that survive mainly because everybody has accepted them: expired cards, updated details, failed recurring payments and pages asking for information the bank already possesses.
Open banking looks strongest when it makes those annoyances feel unnecessary.
There is, admittedly, a habit of mistaking convenience for inevitability. Contactless did not kill cash. Mobile wallets did not kill physical cards. Buy-now-pay-later did not kill credit cards either. Payment systems tend to accumulate rather than replace one another, leaving consumers with an absurdly large collection of ways to buy the same sandwich.
Open banking may follow that pattern. The card will survive precisely because it is so deeply embedded. Merchants accept it. Consumers understand it. Chargebacks and credit protections have created expectations that newer payment methods must match rather than wave away.
But survival is not the same as dominance.
The important change is happening behind the checkout button. A generation ago, paying online effectively meant entering card details. Increasingly, the question is simply which route moves the money with the least resistance. The customer may barely know whether a payment travelled through a card network, a bank connection or a wallet sitting between the two.
That is where cards become vulnerable. Not when shoppers reject them, but when shoppers stop caring whether they use them.
The winner of the next payment war will probably not be the system consumers love most. Nobody loves payment systems. It will be whichever one asks for the least attention.
For a long time, that was the card.
Open banking is finally making a convincing argument that it does not have to be.
