As an Electronic Money Institution (EMI), you already have a payment and account partner in place, whether that’s a traditional bank or a fintech provider. But you might have started to notice that some processes aren’t working as well as they could. 

It could be slow onboarding timelines that delay product launches or restrictions around customer segments and payment flows. In some cases, your EMI account provider may not fully understand your business model, leading to repeated back-and-forth, which slows your progress further. 

As you scale, these limitations become more pronounced. Infrastructure that once supported your earlier use cases may not keep pace as your product evolves. You wait hours for batch-based payment updates to appear in your portal; your team is always searching for workarounds, and new features take longer to go live. 

That’s why many EMIs don’t rely on just one banking partner. In fact, more than half of the EMIs we work with at ClearBank have multiple providers. This helps reduce dependency risk and ensures continued operations, even if one partner becomes restrictive or unavailable. 

In this article, we’ll explore what your EMI bank account partner should offer, and how to choose one that won’t hold you back as you grow.

We’ll cover: 

• When to switch or add a new EMI bank account partner 
• What to look for in an EMI bank account provider  
• Why ClearBank is built to support EMIs at scale 
• Case study: Airwallex expands its UK payment capabilities with ClearBank 

 ClearBank is a UK and EU-authorised B2B bank built to support EMIs. Through our API-first infrastructure and EMI safeguarding capabilities, you can quickly launch and scale payment services, including virtual accounts. To get started right away, reach out to ClearBank. 

Most EMIs add to their current banking setup instead of fully replacing their existing partner. This reduces the risk of relying on a single provider for critical payment flows and creates access to different capabilities as you scale. 

For example, a traditional bank might still handle your credit facilities and broader financial services, while you bring in a second provider to support: 

• Payment infrastructure: Additional access to payment schemes (such as Faster Payments or Bacs) and real-time processing for time-sensitive transactions such as payouts, collections, or customer withdrawals. 
• Virtual accounts: Assigning unique account details to each end customer, using your own BIC or IBAN, keeping your brand at the forefront of customer interactions, while supporting automated reconciliation and quicker account opening. 
• Flexible use cases: High-volume payouts, more complex payment flows (like multi-party or cross-border payments), and expansion into new markets.

In a competitive fintech market, you want to launch as quickly as possible. However, you’re constantly experiencing delays because: 

• Account setup is slow, with long timelines and no clear path to approval. 
• Your provider doesn’t specialise in EMIs, creating ongoing friction as you repeatedly explain your use cases and operational needs. 
• Rolling out changes needs manual intervention and approval, including updating account structures, enabling new features, or supporting new payment flows. 

Your current banking setup wasn’t designed for the modern products you offer, meaning you’re working around: 

• Limited or outdated APIs: For example, APIs that support basic payment initiation, but not virtual account creation or real-time updates. 
• Manual workflows: Such as uploading CSV files for batch payments or relying on multiple portals instead of API-driven automation. 
• Delays in receiving transaction data or updates due to batch processing: Payment statuses or balance updates are only available at set intervals, rather than in real time. 
• Truncated data: Your provider’s portal only displays a limited number of characters, decreasing the information available for your decision-making. 

If you’re onboarding new customers, for example, you may want to assign each one their own account details. But your current bank can’t generate accounts programmatically via API.

Instead, you: 

• Route all funds into a single pooled account 
• Rely on reference numbers to identify payments 
• Manually reconcile transactions, cross-checking reference numbers and customer IDs 

This makes reconciliation time-consuming and error-prone, increasing operational overhead as you scale.

Relying on a single bank or fintech means your institution is exposed if your partner changes strategy (such as deprioritising EMI support), restricts your activity, or offboards your business within a short timeline. 

Let’s say you’re processing thousands or millions of payments each month across multiple customer segments. All of your inbound and outbound payments are routed through your provider’s infrastructure. 

If the provider experiences downtime or introduces new restrictions, you have no immediate alternative route to process payments. Payouts are delayed, and operations teams are forced into manual workarounds, and support tickets spike.

More end users want to receive funds instantly, with immediate visibility into payment status. 

Notification delays and transaction processing cut-off times commonly associated with batch-processing (where payments are processed in scheduled batches rather than in real time) don’t align with these expectations. 

Your provider may also rely on intermediaries to process certain transactions, such as routing payments through a sponsor bank. Each additional step introduces more potential points of failure on the backend. 

As a result, your current setup may limit the types of payment capabilities you can offer.  

You might be missing opportunities for: 

• Real-time payments 
• Immediate event notifications sharing transaction statuses 
• High-volume payout flows 
• More complex use cases 

For instance, you might run a payments platform for businesses that need to hold funds, move money globally, and manage transactions in real time. But your current bank relies on batch processing, which means payments may be delayed outside of specific time windows. 

As a result, customers don’t get the speed or visibility they expect, increasing the risk that they move to another firm that can provide a better payment experience.

Some banking partners become more conservative over time, removing or reducing support for industries (such as digital assets) or geographies. This often happens as your use cases become more complex in nature, or your risk profile changes.  

Imagine an EMI building a payments network. Part of their model involves onboarding other payment service providers (PSPs). Many banks won’t support this due to the perceived risk of nested financial institution relationships or internal policies that limit working with other regulated entities. The EMI is then unable to scale or expand their offering, despite commercial demand.

EMI account providers include traditional banks, earlier-generation fintechs, and API-first banks such as ClearBank. When choosing your next provider, below are the key capabilities to prioritise.

Your banking provider should be able to support both how you operate today and your evolution over time. That might include new payment flows (such as multi-step payment journeys involving multiple parties), expansion into new markets and customer segments, and higher transaction volumes. 

Choosing an EMI bank account provider that can grow with you reduces the need to constantly reconfigure your banking stack. Look for:  

• Flexibility in how accounts and payment flows are structured, such as customer segregated, safeguarding accounts, and multi-currency accounts. 
• Infrastructure that can handle increasing payment volumes without performance issues. 

You may also want to consider whether the provider offers additional capabilities for more advanced features as you grow: embedded banking enables you to offer your customers bank-grade account products, such as interest-bearing and FSCS-protected accounts. The accounts are provided within your platform, while the embedded banking partner provides the underlying regulatory infrastructure. 

Savings accounts, for instance, incentivise higher customer balances and stronger retention. They can also create additional revenue opportunities for your EMI, for example, by generating interest on customer balances.

Look for a provider that is purpose-built to serve EMIs and fintechs. With a generalist provider, you may need to repeatedly explain use cases when resolving issues or launching new products. An EMI-focused partner reduces this friction, which enables smoother onboarding and day-to-day operations. 

Ideally, choose a provider that: 

• Understands EMI safeguarding requirements and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) obligations. 
• Is familiar with EMI payment flows (such as collections, payouts, or multi-step payment journeys) and operational models. 
• Can support complex use cases, such as PSPs onboarding other PSPs. 
• Has direct access to payment schemes (like Faster Payments, Bacs, CHAPS, and SEPA) for greater control over customer data and fewer potential points of failure.

Virtual accounts enable you to create individual account details for each end customer via API, in near real time under your own sort code and BIC. 

Virtual accounts behave like regular accounts from the end user’s perspective. They can receive and send payments, support direct debits, and connect to card networks. And for EMIs, they decrease manual reconciliation, because transactions can be immediately attributed to their relevant accounts. 

For example, a payments platform supporting thousands of users can generate a unique account for each user in seconds, instead of routing all funds into a pooled account and relying on reference data. This enables clean GBP collections and automated reconciliation.  

But many providers don’t offer virtual accounts and vIBANs at scale, which is why it’s important to take this capability into consideration before signing up with a new partner.

For a more direct flow of data and account management, your bank account partner should ideally integrate directly with your platform via API. 

This enables you to create accounts programmatically during onboarding instead of investing too many resources in manual work. Payments can be triggered automatically when certain conditions are met (such as a job completed or an invoice approved) instead of requiring a separate approval. And transaction updates are received instantly, so you know their status immediately. 

Look for:  

• Well-documented, developer-friendly APIs and testing environments.  
• The ability to test products in sandbox environments for faster launches. 
• Real-time payment processing (depending on the payment scheme used) with the ability to initiate and confirm payments instantly. 
• Event-driven architecture (e.g., webhooks) for instant notifications when funds are received, payments are completed or fail, and account activity changes. 
• Full API coverage across key workflows, not just payments, but also account lifecycle management, reconciliation data, and reporting.

ClearBank is a UK-authorised and UK and European regualted B2B bank built specifically to support regulated financial institutions such as EMIs. With over £18 billion in deposits, we provide the account infrastructure, safeguarding, and payment connectivity needed to hold funds, move money, and operate at scale.  

All client funds are held securely at the Bank of England, DNB and ECB with 24/7, 365-day-a-year access. 

Here are a few reasons EMIs like Airwallex, PingPong and TrueLayer have partnered with us: 

ClearBank is designed around the operational realities of EMIs so that you can scale with fewer delays. This means a deep understanding of EMI safeguarding requirements and familiarity with your operational models. 

Integrate our solutions directly into your platform with our cloud-native, API-first infrastructure. Then you can speed up your payment processes with:  

• Real-time payments through access to the underlying payment schemes (including Faster Payments, Bacs, CHAPS, and SEPA). 
• Automated payment initiation, which can trigger automatically based on user actions or predefined conditions. 
• Event-driven updates with webhooks, so your system receives real-time notifications when key events occur, such as payments completing or failing. 

These capabilities can be delivered under your own brand, giving you full control over how your services are presented to customers.

With ClearBank’s API, you can assign unique account details (including vIBANs) to each end customer using virtual accounts, create real accounts, or combine both depending on your use case. Virtual accounts can be created in seconds, enabling you to offer customers named accounts under your brand and sort code that look, feel, and act like real accounts.  

This setup also improves how your payments are managed behind the scenes. Virtual accounts remove the need to route funds through pooled accounts and rely on reference data to identify payments. Reconciliation becomes faster and more reliable, and you gain clearer visibility into how funds move across your platform.

As your product evolves, your banking infrastructure will need to support higher transaction volumes and more elaborate payment flows. 

ClearBank’s agency banking infrastructure is built to support these requirements, including more complex use cases such as: 

• PSPs serving other PSPs 
• International transactions (such as GBP and EUR payments via UK and SEPA schemes) 
• Digital asset-related payment flows 

You may also want to expand beyond payments into more advanced account products, such as savings accounts. This is where our embedded banking solution can support your growth. It enables you to offer additional financial products directly within your platform, helping you increase customer retention and create new revenue opportunities. 

A 2024 study conducted by Forrester Total Economic Impact™ commissioned by ClearBank found that UK firms using ClearBank’s embedded banking capabilities generated £9.7 million in incremental profit through product expansion and cross-selling, while also improving customer retention by 3%.

Airwallex is a global payments and financial platform that processes $235b+ USD payments annually. When the company decided to strengthen its UK offerings, requirements included offering local GBP collections, providing virtual business accounts, and accessing UK payment schemes.  

Working with ClearBank enabled Airwallex to expand its UK presence, where it can now: 

• Issue virtual accounts and IBANs under the Airwallex brand 
• Provide GBP collection capabilities 
• Access UK payment schemes directly 
• Implement Confirmation of Payee (CoP) functionality 

“ClearBank’s agency banking solution aligns perfectly with our vision, allowing us to enhance our product offering in the UK while maintaining our brand identity… The team’s deep understanding of our business needs and their speed of execution have been invaluable.”  Vivien Cheung, Head of Financial Partnerships, EMEA, Airwallex 

Read the full story here: Airwallex bolsters its UK payment capabilities with ClearBank partnership.

The ideal EMI bank account provider can support basic requirements like safeguarding while offering opportunities to scale with higher volumes and more advanced use cases.  

ClearBank is designed to support EMIs. Whether you’re onboarding your first customers and setting up payment flow or scaling your operations across new markets, we have the infrastructure to support your next stage. To find out more, reach out to us.