On November 5, 2026, Segpay, the Boca Raton–based processor whose client list includes adult, cam, fan and dating merchants, said it has expanded its "Pay by Bank" checkout to eight European markets. The service launched in the United Kingdom and Germany and is now also live in Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain. AVN reported the news and Segpay published it in its own newsroom. Customers pick their bank at checkout and approve the payment in their banking app, usually with Face ID or a fingerprint. No card number is entered, and Segpay says confirmation arrives "within seconds."

Why It Matters

**This routes around the card networks for one-off sales.** For adult merchants, Visa and Mastercard are the point of control. Their rules decide which content is allowed, how much monitoring is required and how many chargebacks a merchant can absorb before losing its account. Mastercard's new scam-merchant program, for example, can trigger a review once refunds plus chargebacks pass 5% for young, high-volume accounts ([our coverage](/stories/mastercard-smmp-adult-merchants)). An account-to-account payment is not a card transaction, so card-network chargeback rules don't apply to it. That benefits clip stores, pay-per-view, token purchases and DTC toy retailers selling in euros and pounds. Japan's DLsite has already shown that bank-direct checkout can grow into a real revenue line when card access is uncertain ([our coverage](/stories/dlsite-bank-payment-card-workaround)). **The limits matter just as much.** Without recurring billing, the largest pool of adult-platform revenue, monthly subscriptions, still runs on cards. And moving off card networks does not remove gatekeepers. Banks, payment-initiation providers like TrueLayer, and the instant-payment schemes all have their own risk policies, and Japan's banks have shown they will close accounts over content ([our coverage](/stories/japan-banks-debank-adult-game-devs)). Watch whether Segpay adds recurring support (the UK's open-banking rails already allow variable recurring payments) and how much consumer uptake it reports. Both will show whether this becomes a real alternative to cards for the adult industry or remains a niche checkout option.

How it works. TrueLayer powers the service, which runs on real-time account-to-account networks: SEPA Instant in the EU and Faster Payments in the UK. "Not every customer wants to pay with a credit card, and we want to make sure our merchants have options," said Segpay president and CEO Cathy Beardsley. "Pay by Bank gives them another way to accept payments, without the chargeback concerns that come with traditional card transactions." A company representative added that because the bank authorizes each payment directly, "merchants don't have to deal with traditional card-network chargebacks." Refunds are still supported.

What it doesn't cover. Pay by Bank currently handles one-time purchases in GBP and EUR only, under Segpay's One-Time, Digital Purchase and Dynamic Pricing billing models. Recurring payments are not supported, and recurring billing is the model fan sites and paysites depend on. The rollout continues a European build-out that AVN has tracked: a SEPA processing expansion in January and the UK Pay by Bank launch in March. Segpay's newsroom also lists a September 2026 Australian expansion, which it describes as making it the country's first high-risk payment processor.

Sources

Update — 2026-11-06

Initial entry — story first created.