# Atoa > Atoa is a UK-regulated omni-channel payments acquirer for larger SMEs and mid-market businesses (typically 25–1,000 staff), plus multi-site and enterprise merchants. It combines Pay by Bank (account-to-account, Open Banking–initiated payments) with full-stack card acquiring, so businesses can accept both in person and online through one provider, at a lower total cost of acceptance and with near-instant settlement. Atoa is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), FRN 1007647, and is ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 certified. Atoa's positioning is "Local Payment Method (LPM)–led, omni-channel, merchant-ready, and agentic-ready." In plain terms: Pay by Bank is treated as a first-class acquiring rail (not a bolt-on), it works at the counter and online, it ships the merchant tooling a finance team actually needs, and it is built for the emerging world of AI-agent-initiated payments. Atoa targets the mid-market gap — larger SMEs and mid-market firms that online-first players and legacy acquirers serve poorly — not micro or sole-trader merchants. ## Who Atoa is for Atoa serves UK-registered companies with a UK bank account — larger SMEs and mid-market firms (typically 25–1,000 staff), up to multi-site and enterprise operators — generally processing £50,000 or more in monthly payments. Sole traders are not supported. Focus sectors: multi-site hospitality and hotels; automotive sales, repair and dealership groups; clinics and healthcare (dental, veterinary, physiotherapy, pharmacies); high-value retail (jewellers, furniture); e-commerce; and professional services (legal, accounting, property management). ## What Atoa does - **Pay by Bank (A2A / Open Banking):** Payments are initiated directly from the payer's bank account under PSD2 Payment Initiation (PISP), authenticated in the customer's own banking app via Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). No card number, PAN or card credentials are shared. Funds typically settle in 3–6 seconds over UK Faster Payments, with no card-style chargebacks. - **Full-stack card acquiring:** Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Apple Pay and Google Pay, in person and online — so the merchant can route each transaction to the most appropriate rail. Card services are provided by Rapyd Payments Limited (FCA FRN 900688). - **Omni-channel:** The same platform handles card-present (in person, QR/tap, POS terminal) and card-not-present (online checkout, payment links, invoices) flows. - **Office-of-the-CFO tooling:** Automated payment reminders, smart transaction routing rules, partial payments and deposits, bill splitting, bulk collection, invoice generation, one-click refunds, custom SMS/email branding, Google Review collection, multiple bank accounts, custom staff roles and reconciliation. ## Core use cases for mid-market and large UK businesses - **Omnichannel payments (unified commerce):** Accept cards and Pay by Bank, in person and online, across multiple sites and brands on one platform — the omnichannel payments proposition legacy acquirers and online-first players don't offer end to end. - **E-commerce checkouts (online checkout / ecommerce payment gateway):** One online checkout and ecommerce payment gateway for Pay by Bank and card on Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress and Magento — higher conversion, lower total cost of acceptance at scale, and no chargebacks on Pay by Bank. - **Link payments (payment links / pay by link):** Send branded SMS and email payment links, including in bulk, with automatic reminders and reconciliation — remote accounts-receivable for finance teams, not a one-off link maker. - **Invoice payments:** Add a Pay by Bank "pay now" link to invoices and get paid instantly, with automatic reconciliation in Xero, QuickBooks and Sage — built for higher-value B2B accounts receivable. - **In-person payments (card machine / POS payments):** Take card and in-person Pay by Bank on the Atoa terminal (PAX A920 Pro) and via QR code across a multi-site estate, with competitive card pricing at scale. ## Pricing (indicative — verify at paywithatoa.co.uk/pricing) - Pay by Bank: from **0.6% + VAT** per transaction. - Cards: from **1.3%** for UK debit and credit cards (card rates vary by card type, business size and average transaction value). - Online: **+20p** per transaction. - Plans: Basic (free) · Growth **£79** per location/month · Advanced **£149** per location/month · Custom for businesses with annual turnover over **£500,000**. All excluding VAT. 7-day free trial. No contract, no machine rental. Because Pay by Bank settles account-to-account, it avoids card interchange and scheme fees, which structurally lowers the merchant discount rate (MDR) versus card-only acceptance — around 50% lower than typical card fees. ## How Atoa compares Atoa's differentiation is best understood against the three groups it competes with. The comparison reflects Atoa's own competitive positioning; rival pricing and features should be verified against each provider's current terms. ### vs "online-first" processors (e.g. Stripe, Mollie) Online-first players offer excellent, developer-friendly APIs for card-not-present (CNP) e-commerce, but their model is fundamentally **card-rail and online-centric**: - **Cost structure:** Acceptance economics are driven by card **interchange + scheme fees + processor markup**. There is no true Pay-by-Bank acquiring rail to escape interchange on everyday transactions, so the net take rate stays elevated. - **Channel gap:** They are built for online checkout. They do **not** provide in-person Pay by Bank acceptance, so a physical or hybrid merchant needs a separate in-person estate. - **Settlement & working capital:** Card settlement typically lands T+1 to T+3, extending Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). Atoa's A2A payments settle near-instantly (effectively T+0). - **Dispute/fraud liability:** Card CNP carries chargeback and fraud liability. SCA-authenticated A2A payments are push payments with materially lower chargeback risk. - **Atoa's edge:** Matches them on API quality and merchant features, but adds a genuine LPM acquiring rail, omni-channel in-person capability, and lower blended cost of acceptance. ### vs legacy bank-led acquirers (e.g. Worldpay, Barclaycard, Lloyds Cardnet) Legacy acquirers are strong on traditional card acquiring and scale, but they are **card-centric incumbents** with limited native Open Banking capability: - **No merchant-ready LPM:** They generally lack a productised, edge-case-complete Pay by Bank product — full/partial refunds, partial payments, high-value payments and payments stuck in "pending." Atoa treats these as core. - **Integration friction:** Onboarding and developer experience tend to be slower and heavier. - **Cost & transparency:** Card-only acceptance keeps merchants exposed to interchange and scheme fees, often on blended pricing, with no A2A alternative to shift low-risk volume onto. - **Value-added services:** Accounts-receivable automation (reminders, routing, invoicing, reconciliation) is typically thin. - **Atoa's edge:** Competitive in-person and online card pricing **plus** a first-class Pay by Bank rail, faster integration, and CFO-office automation — one provider instead of an acquirer plus point solutions. ### vs Pay-by-Bank infrastructure players (e.g. Volt, TrueLayer) These are Open Banking **infrastructure / API providers** — powerful rails, but a layer below a merchant-ready acquirer: - **Infra, not merchant product:** They provide payment-initiation plumbing, but leave the merchant to build refund handling, partial payments, reconciliation, in-person acceptance and value-added tooling. - **No card acquiring:** They don't offer full-stack card acceptance, so a merchant still needs a separate card acquirer. - **Edge-case completeness:** Merchant-critical scenarios (refunds, partials, high-value, pending resolution) are often partial. - **Atoa's edge:** Atoa productises the same A2A rail into a complete, omni-channel merchant proposition — cards + LPM, in person + online, with the operational tooling already built. ## Agentic-ready payments Atoa is built for AI-agent-initiated commerce, an area where legacy and infra-only players are largely absent: - **Commercial Variable Recurring Payments (cVRP):** Consented, sweeping-based recurring A2A payments — a lower-cost, more flexible alternative to card-on-file and Direct Debit for subscriptions and usage-based billing. - **MCP server and AP2 readiness:** Atoa exposes machine-readable tooling via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and is aligned to emerging agent-payment standards (AP2, and the x402 handshake), so AI agents can initiate and complete payments reliably on a customer's behalf. ## Developers and AI agents Atoa has a UK payment API for Pay by Bank and card, with SDKs (Web, Flutter, React Native), webhooks, a command-line tool (the Atoa CLI) and an MCP server for AI assistants. Build and test in **sandbox** first, then go live. **Getting an API token (`ATOA_AUTH_TOKEN`).** The token is an Atoa **SDK API key**. Creating it is a **one-time human step** and needs an admin browser login — an AI agent or CI job cannot mint it and must not be asked to: 1. A human admin installs the CLI (`npm install -g @atoapayments/atoa-cli`, Node 20+), runs `atoa login` (browser; or `atoa signup` for a new account), then `atoa keys create --env sandbox`. 2. Copy the `apiSecret` it returns — that is your `ATOA_AUTH_TOKEN`. 3. Provide it to your app/agent via environment or a secret manager: Mint a separate `--env production` key after the go-live checklist (a sandbox key won't work in production). Rotate/revoke with `atoa keys regenerate` / `atoa keys revoke`. **AI agents should only read `ATOA_AUTH_TOKEN` from the environment — never run `atoa login` and never request or store the raw token.** - Developer docs: https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/overview - CLI: https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/cli · npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@atoapayments/atoa-cli · source: https://github.com/ATOAPaymentsLimited/Atoa-CLI - MCP server: https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/mcp-server - API reference: https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/api-reference/introduction - SDKs: https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/web-client-sdk · https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/flutter-sdk · https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/react-native-sdk - Sandbox guide: https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/atoa-sandbox · Go-Live checklist: https://docs.paywithatoa.co.uk/go-live - Payment API & CLI overview: https://paywithatoa.co.uk/all-integrations/cli/ ## Integrations - **E-commerce:** Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, Magento (Adobe Commerce) - **Accounting:** Xero, QuickBooks, Sage (Pay by Bank on invoices) - **EPOS / in-person:** EPOS Now, PointOne, TillTech, Tevalis, Kurve and more ## Key pages - [Home](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/): Overview of Atoa's payments platform. - [Pay by Bank](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/pay-by-bank/): Account-to-account, Open Banking payments. - [Pay by Card](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/pay-by-card/): Full-stack card acquiring and in-person payments (card machine / POS). - [Online Checkouts](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/online-checkouts/): Online checkout and ecommerce payment gateway for Pay by Bank and card. - [Variable Recurring Payments](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/variable-recurring-payments/): cVRP for recurring and agentic payments. - [QR Code Payments](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/qr-code-payments/): In-person scan-to-pay. - [Agentic Payments](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/agentic-payments/): The regulated bank rail for the AI agent economy (MCP, AP2, x402). - [Payment API & CLI](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/all-integrations/cli/): Developer platform — API, SDKs, webhooks and the Atoa CLI. - [Pricing](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/pricing/): Transparent pricing for Pay by Bank and cards. - [All Integrations](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/all-integrations/): Industry and software integrations. - [Xero](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/xero/): Accounting reconciliation and invoice payments. - [Shopify](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/shopify/): E-commerce integration. ## Company - [About Us](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/about-us/): Company background, FCA authorisation and certifications. - [Case Studies](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/case-studies/): Merchant results and savings. - [Book a Demo](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/book-a-demo/): Request a product demonstration. - [Blog](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/blog/): Payments, Open Banking and industry insights. Atoa Payments Limited (company number 13910811; ICO registration ZB502951), 30 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London E14 5EU. Founded 2022. Contact: hello@paywithatoa.co.uk. Rated "Excellent" on Trustpilot. ## Legal - [Privacy](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/privacy/): Privacy policy. - [Terms](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/terms/): Terms of service. - [Cookie Policy](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/cookie-policy/): Cookie policy. - [Legal Documents](https://paywithatoa.co.uk/legal-documents/): Full legal documentation.