The honest comparison.
There are four ways to assemble the payments side of a business. All of them work, and each of the other three genuinely wins something. The differences are what this page is about.
| Attribute | One provider per methodA PSP here, a local method there | A global acquirerOne of the large names | Build it yourselfYour own orchestration | Banky |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contracts to sign | One per provider, each with its own terms | One | One per provider, plus the build | One |
| Integrations to maintain | One per provider, each with its own quirks | One | All of them, and the layer above them | One |
| Adding a market's local method | Find a provider, contract, integrate | If they carry it | A project | Enable it per country |
| Where the money lands | A different account per provider | Their settlement account | Wherever you built it to | Multi-currency accounts and IBANs in your name |
| Reconciliation | Per provider, then merged by you | Theirs | Yours to build | One place, across every method |
| Payouts and refunds | Per provider, where supported | Usually card refunds only | Yours to build | Refunds, single and batch payouts, bank and crypto |
| How it is priced | A rate per provider | Published card rates, negotiated at volume | Provider rates, plus the engineering | —1 |
| Reach | Whatever you have assembled | Very wide | Whatever you have assembled | The markets and methods we have built2 |
| Control over routing and logic | Yours, by wiring it yourself | Theirs | Total | Configured with you, not coded by you3 |
- 1
Banky prices per merchant, by volume, sector and market, and there is no public rate to put in this cell. Leaving it blank is more honest than filling it with a number nobody has agreed — ask sales and you will get the actual figure for your business.
- 2
This is the row the global acquirers win, and they win it comfortably. Banky's method and country coverage is a build, market by market — a large acquirer has been doing that for twenty years and reaches places we do not.
- 3
If your differentiation genuinely is your own payment routing — you have modelled it, you have people who own it, it wins you money — then building it is the right call and no platform should talk you out of it. Banky is for the businesses where payments are infrastructure rather than the product.
When you shouldn't pick us.
If you sell into markets we haven't built.
Coverage is a market-by-market build and a large global acquirer reaches places we do not. If your volume is concentrated somewhere we have not reached, they are not a worse choice than Banky — they are the only one.
If payment routing is your actual product.
Some businesses win on their own routing logic and should own every part of it. If that is you, a platform that configures routing with you is taking away the thing you compete on.
If you only ever need one method, in one country.
A single provider will be simpler and probably cheaper. The case for a platform starts at the second method or the second market — before that, you are paying for flexibility you are not using.