Payment Initiation Services (PIS) allow licensed providers—called PISPs (Payment Initiation Service Providers)—to initiate payments from a customer’s bank account to a payee via open banking APIs, with the customer’s consent. The payment is executed by the bank; the PISP does not hold funds.

PIS enables account-to-account payments (e.g. SEPA, Faster Payments, ACH), often with instant or same-day settlement and lower fees than card schemes. Use cases include e-commerce checkout, bill pay, and person-to-person or business-to-business transfers. In the EU and UK, PISPs are regulated under PSD2 and the UK Open Banking Standard.

Many open banking aggregators offer both AIS and PIS so that a single API can read accounts and initiate payments. The Open Banking Tracker lists aggregators by PIS support and geographic coverage.