How QR Code Payments Actually Work

QR payments come in two flavours, and they cost very different amounts of money. Pick the wrong one and you’ll pay card-rate fees when you didn’t have to.

Choose the payment rail before you choose the QR provider, because the rail determines how the transaction is processed and charged.

Type one: card-based QR. You display a code, on a card, a table tent, or a poster. Your customer scans it with their phone camera. A hosted checkout page loads. They enter their card details or tap Apple Pay or Google Pay.

From that point, it’s a normal card transaction running on Visa or Mastercard. The QR code is really just a URL in a box, and you pay card processing rates.

Type two: Open Banking QR, also called Pay by Bank. The code sends a payment request through a regulated payment initiation service provider. Your customer’s phone then opens their banking app directly.

They authenticate with Face ID, fingerprint, or PIN. The money moves via Faster Payments, straight from their account to yours. No card network. No interchange fee.

A Camden cafe at 8am taking £4 lattes through SumUp QR is on the first rail, paying card rates. A Soho restaurant at 10pm taking £180 dinner bills through Atoa or Wonderful is on the second, with no interchange to pay.

The scan looks much the same to your customers, but the fee structure is different. Comparing the two routes, we pick the rail first and the QR provider second.

Static vs dynamic codes. A static QR code is fixed, you print once and use indefinitely. A dynamic code is generated fresh for each transaction, with the amount pre-encoded in the code itself.

Card-based providers like SumUp and Square typically use static codes. Most Open Banking providers use dynamic codes. Dynamic codes are harder to tamper with, an expired copy leads nowhere, and they let you reconcile each payment to a specific transaction.

The practical benefit appears during reconciliation, when each dynamic code can be matched to the payment it generated instead of leaving the bookkeeper to identify it manually. For your cash flow, the other difference that counts is when the takings reach your account, not how quickly the customer scans the code.

The UK QR Landscape in 2026

Customer willingness is now the more useful question for a UK business, because the payment infrastructure caught up in 2025 and is already widely available.

Open Banking Limited confirmed the UK passed 15 million active Open Banking user connections in mid-2026, with nearly 33 million transactions in November 2025 alone. 94% of UK adults now own a smartphone and 42% use mobile contactless payments regularly.

Amazon UK launched Pay by Bank at checkout in 2026. When a retailer that size adopts a payment method, we read it as a signal that consumer readiness is no longer the barrier.

The question now is whether your specific customers will use it, not whether the country at large is ready.

Open Banking QR providers you’ll meet in the UK. Wonderful targets hospitality, beauty and retail, and charges a flat monthly fee with no percentage on the payment itself.

You pay for the allowance whether you use it or not, so the effective rate depends entirely on how close you run to it. Fill the Pro allowance and each payment costs you 4p. Take 800 payments on the same plan and each one costs 12p. Work out the cost per payment before choosing a tier. A lower monthly fee can still cost you more if you leave most of its transaction allowance unused.

The other Open Banking routes each suit a different starting point:

• Atoa focuses on hospitality.
• Noda advertises a flat 20p per payment.
• Stripe has integrated Tink for UK Open Banking, so a business already on Stripe can present a QR that routes via Open Banking rather than a card network.
• GoCardless has expanded into instant payment initiations alongside its direct debit core.
• NatWest Payit has variable recurring payment partnerships with Tink, Token and Yapily, positioning it as a white-label Pay by Bank product for business customers.

The pricing rules behind those recurring payments settled in January 2026. The Financial Conduct Authority and the Payment Systems Regulator said on 20 January that they would not, at that stage, open a competition investigation into the central access fee the UK Payments Initiative is building for commercial variable recurring payments (fca.org.uk, checked 31 August 2026). That position holds until the government’s framework arrives or July 2027, whichever comes first, so any fee model you are quoted now has a known shelf life.

If you run a hospitality site and want the lowest cost per payment at meaningful volume, Wonderful and Atoa are the two we shortlist.

If you’re already on Stripe and want Open Banking without changing provider, the Tink integration is the path of least resistance.

Card-based QR providers. SumUp, Square, Stripe and PayPal are the four card-based names you will meet most often, and we compare their QR rates in the fees table below.

Alipay+ and WeChat Pay, the Chinese payment rails:

Both operate on merchant-presented QR. Your customer scans your code with Alipay or WeChat Pay and authenticates in-app. Settlement flows in GBP to your account via a UK aggregator. Options include Airwallex, Globepay, and hosted checkout products from Stripe and PayPal.

Alipay+ is broader than Alipay alone. It covers partner wallets including GCash (Philippines), Kakao Pay (South Korea), and Touch ‘n Go (Malaysia). If your customers include students or visitors from across Asia rather than just China, your acceptance reaches further than you’d expect.

Fees and Economics by Rail

The fee gap is the main financial reason to consider Open Banking rather than card-based QR. On the published provider prices we compared, the value of switching rises with your average sale and your transaction volume.

Open Banking QR. No interchange. No card scheme fee. You pay your provider either a fixed amount per payment or a monthly subscription that covers a set number of them. Published fixed rates sit around £0.20 to £0.50 a transaction, while the subscription route works out between 4p and 8p once you divide the monthly fee by the allowance it buys.

At a £20 average transaction, a provider charging £0.20 a payment works out at a 1% effective rate. Noda quoted that flat 20p when it launched its UK Pay by Bank service for offline merchants in March 2025, and it does not publish a current rate card, so treat 20p as the advertised starting point rather than the price you will be quoted. SumUp charges 2.5% on online payments, which is two and a half times that.

We make that two and a half times the cost in this example, which is reason enough to price both routes against your own payment mix.

Open Banking fees vary by provider, and the shape of the fee matters as much as the size of it. Noda advertises a flat rate per payment. Wonderful sells you a monthly allowance. Finexer prices by usage. Compare at your actual volume rather than against a single example rate, because the rank order changes depending on how busy you are.

Take a restaurant with 2,000 transactions a month averaging £15. SumUp’s 2.5% online rate takes £750 out of £30,000 of takings. Wonderful’s Pro plan covers those 2,000 payments inside its £96 monthly fee, £115.20 once you add VAT. That comparison takes ten minutes with your own statements, and it is worth doing before you sign anything.

Card-based QR. Online card processing rates apply, not the in-person rates your card reader earns.

This is where the costing usually goes wrong, because the in-person rate is the one everybody quotes. Square is the clearest example: 1.75% in person against 1.4% plus 25p online, which on a £10 sale is 17.5p one way and 39p the other. SumUp, Square and Stripe publish no QR-specific rate card; we read each one’s pricing page to be sure. For those three, treat the online rate as the one you will pay unless your own merchant statements tell you otherwise.

Refund mechanics, the part most QR guides skip. Open Banking QR has no chargeback process. If your customer pays via Pay by Bank and later wants a refund, they have fewer institutional levers than they would with a card payment.

You must initiate the refund manually because Open Banking payments do not include a card-network dispute route.

For purchases where a customer might rely on card dispute rights, high-value items, services that could be disputed as not-delivered , card QR preserves those rights. Open Banking QR doesn’t. If you sell anything where a refund argument is likely, keep card on the menu for that segment.

The upside for you is real. Open Banking’s fraud rate is 0.013% versus 0.045% for the industry average. Lower fraud cost and fewer chargebacks, in exchange for weaker consumer protection.

You are choosing between lower merchant risk and the additional dispute protections customers receive when they pay by card.

When does the maths tip in favour of Open Banking QR? The saving grows with your average transaction value. For a coffee shop doing £3 transactions the difference is small. For a restaurant at £25 or more per head it stacks up fast.

A 20p Open Banking fee as a share of the sale

Average sale	Effective rate at 20p
£10	2%, no cheaper than a card
£20	1%
£25	0.8%
£50	0.4%
Verified 31 August 2026.

Run the numbers on your own transaction mix before you switch, and on the last three months, not on the busiest week of the year.

Use Cases That Work (and Some That Don’t)

Hospitality table-pay. If you run a restaurant or bar, this is the use case worth taking seriously on its own merits, separate from any fee argument.

Diners scan a code on the table, split the bill, and pay from their banking app. Floor staff stop carrying terminals to each table at the end of service. That’s the entire pitch.

SumUp claims up to 15 minutes saved per table at busy services. Even if we discount that figure by half, the end-of-meal payment bottleneck is the single most preventable friction point in a busy Friday service, and removing it is worth more than the fee saving.

A Soho restaurant using Atoa or Wonderful for table-pay also avoids the card network fee on table bills. That is a real advantage on hospitality margins that are already thin. The caveat: some customers will still want a card terminal. Keep one available.

Table-pay makes the case for QR in UK hospitality on operations first and fee saving second.

Market traders and pop-up sellers. For a Bristol farmers’ market trader on a wet Saturday morning, a laminated SumUp QR card can be simpler than carrying another piece of hardware between pitches.

There is no reader to charge, carry or hunt for when the queue starts moving.

The 2.5% fee is higher than a card reader’s 1.75%, but the zero capital outlay and zero hardware risk are genuine advantages if you only trade occasionally. If you’re on a regular pitch four days a week, a card reader pays for itself quickly at that volume.

Donations and community fundraising. Printed QR codes on collection stands, leaflets, or event posters work well for charities and community groups.

Open Banking QR costs a few pence a payment rather than a percentage of every donation, which matters most when the average gift is small. On Wonderful’s Pro plan a filled allowance works out at 4p a donation. A card processor charging 1.4% plus 25p takes 32p out of a £5 gift. GoCardless and Wonderful are common choices. Your donations land directly in your bank account, with no cash to count and no floats to reconcile at the end of the event.

Tourist-facing retail. An Oxford Street retailer or a heritage gift shop near a major UK attraction can accept Alipay+ via merchant-presented QR. Your customer scans with their Alipay or WeChat Pay app and authenticates in-app. The payment settles in GBP to your account.

If your shop sits near a major UK university with a sizeable Asian student population, Alipay+ coverage extends to Korean, Filipino, and Malaysian wallets too. Worth checking your actual catchment before you assume Alipay+ is only a Central London concern.

Sole traders and tradespeople. A London photographer finishes a shoot, generates a Stripe payment link on their phone, and shows the QR to the client before leaving the shoot. Payment collected on the spot. No invoice to chase. No card reader to carry.

If you’re already on Stripe or Square, try this before buying a card reader. You can create and share a QR-linked checkout in under a minute.

Where QR doesn’t work as your main payment method. In each of these, QR supplements card and does not replace it:

• An older customer base. A traditional tearoom or a suburban pharmacist needs card terminals as the default, because QR as the only checkout will cost sales.
• High-value purchases. A £1,200 laptop or a £2,500 piece of furniture carries Section 75 Consumer Credit Act protection on a credit card that Open Banking QR can’t replicate.
• Low-signal sites. Festival sites, building basements and rural outdoor markets favour a card reader with offline mode, because a QR checkout needs mobile data or Wi-Fi at the authentication step.

Our rule for QR is simple: add it where it pays for itself, don’t force it where it doesn’t.

The Risks: Quishing, Trust, and Friction

Quishing deserves attention because a criminal can replace a genuine printed code without changing anything in your payment system.

The numbers we pulled aren’t subtle. Action Fraud recorded a 587% rise in QR-code phishing reports between 2023 and 2025. Microsoft threat data shows quishing surged 146% in Q1 2026. Europol’s 2026 assessment flags it as the fastest-rising payment-initiation attack across the EU.

The attack requires little technical skill because the criminal changes the printed code rather than interfering with the payment system behind it.

A fraudster prints a QR sticker and places it over yours, on a parking meter, a restaurant table tent, an electric vehicle charging point. Your customer scans it, lands on a fraudulent checkout that looks identical to the real one, and enters their card details or banking credentials.

For you as a merchant, this matters in two ways. First, your displayed QR code can be physically replaced without your knowledge, and your customers lose money while associating that loss with you.

Second, consumer wariness around QR scanning is now real. Several UK councils issued warnings in early 2026, and the general noise around quishing has reached the point where a customer can hesitate over a table code for reasons that have nothing to do with your business.

What you can do. A restaurant manager opening up on Monday morning glances at the table QR card and notices the edges do not quite line up: a fraudster placed a sticker overnight.

For a static code, regular physical inspection is the main way to spot a replacement sticker before another customer scans it.

• Inspect every printed code as part of your opening routine, so it actually happens.
• Look for the signs of a replacement: stickers over stickers, misaligned edges or different paper quality.
• Use dynamic codes where your provider supports them. A code regenerated for each transaction means an old copy leads nowhere, so the attack is blunted, and that is why we prefer them.

For Open Banking QR, the payment authenticates inside your customer’s banking app, a much harder environment to spoof than a card entry page. The lower Open Banking fraud rate is a real advantage, but it does not remove the physical display risk.

Consumer trust and the smartphone requirement. QR payments need a smartphone, mobile data or Wi-Fi, and a willing customer. For regulars who already tap their phone to pay, that is trivial.

For first-time customers, or anyone rushing for a train, the redirect-to-banking-app journey adds friction.

Roughly 6% of UK adults don’t own a smartphone, and that share concentrates in older demographics. If you serve a mixed age group, don’t pull the card terminal when you add QR.

Should Your Business Add QR Acceptance? A Decision Framework

Decide first whether QR will reduce your payment costs, remove useful hardware or make checkout easier for your customers. If it does none of those things, adding another payment route achieves little.

Start with the rail, not the format. Card-based QR is just a card payment without a card reader. If you already accept cards, switching to card-based QR doesn’t reduce your fees.

Open Banking QR is the one that changes the economics. The question worth asking is whether Open Banking QR specifically makes sense for your situation, not whether QR as a format does. Those are different questions, and most guides blur them.

Run the fee comparison at your actual average transaction value. A fixed Open Banking fee of around 20p only beats a card rate once your average sale is comfortably above £10.

Higher-value sales favour a fixed payment fee because the charge does not rise with the size of the bill, and the fees we compared show the gap widening as the sale grows.

If you haven’t run these numbers at your actual transaction mix, you’re guessing. Pull three months of statement data before you make any decision about changing payment provider, and do it now, not in the middle of a summer trading rush when nobody has the headspace.

Consider whether your customers will use it. If most of your customers already tap their phone to pay, adding Open Banking QR is low-friction.

If a large proportion insert a card and type a PIN, the “scan this code, then open your banking app, then authenticate” journey will feel like extra work for them.

If you’re in hospitality, evaluate table-pay separately. The operational argument, customers split bills themselves, staff aren’t running terminals to tables at the end of service, stands on its own, separate from the fee question.

For hospitality, we rate table-pay as the clearest case for QR even when the fee saving is modest, because customers can settle the bill without waiting for a terminal.

If you have Chinese tourist or Asian diaspora traffic, Alipay+ is worth pricing properly. Airwallex charges no separate setup fee and lists local payment methods at 20p plus the wallet’s own fee. No Alipay+ line appears anywhere in its published pricing, which we read in full, so the headline 20p is not the whole price. Its UK account plans start at £19 a month, waived if you keep £10,000 on deposit (airwallex.com/uk/pricing, checked 31 August 2026).

Airwallex’s published pricing does not show the Alipay+ wallet fee, so the service cannot be costed from its UK rate card alone. Whatever that fee turns out to be, the sales you currently turn away are what it has to beat.

Alipay+ is worth raising with your payment provider when your customers include tourists or students who already use its partner wallets. That is most likely near a major UK tourist site, a university with a large Asian student population, or in Central London.

What we avoid. Three mistakes cost businesses the most:

• switching to QR-only without checking your customer demographics first
• assuming card-based QR saves you money when it doesn’t
• deploying static codes without a physical inspection routine

Frequently Asked Questions