Nearly every property management platform we've looked at has the same screen somewhere. It might be called unallocated receipts or bank reconciliation, and it's where agents spend part of every week matching bank lines to tenancies by hand.
That screen exists because the software holds the tenancy, the rent schedule, the client ledger and the landlord statement, but not the payment. The money moves somewhere else, through a standing order the tenant set up or a Direct Debit run by someone else, and comes back as a line on a bank statement with whatever reference someone typed.
We think this is the biggest gap left in property management software, and open banking is the way to close it.
What agents keep asking for
When we talk to letting agents and property managers, the same requests come up. They want receipts that allocate themselves rather than a nicer screen for allocating them manually. They want landlords paid faster, because landlords judge them on when the money arrives and BACS cycles slow that down. They want fraud checks that actually work, and the numbers explain why: Goodlord found suspected tenancy fraud rose by almost 40% in 2025, with fake employment references up 226.6%. And they want records that stand up to the Renters' Rights Act, Client Money Protection rules, Making Tax Digital and the service charge transparency rules on the way.
Every one of those comes down to payments or bank data, and every one is easier to solve inside the platform than next to it.
What embedding open banking gives a platform
The obvious part is taking payments where the money is owed: a pay by bank option in the tenant portal, on every rent demand and on every service charge invoice. The platform sets the amount and reference, the tenant approves in their banking app, and the payment settles over Faster Payments. The receipt is allocated before anyone opens the reconciliation screen.
The less obvious part is bank data. With the user's consent, open banking can confirm who owns an account and show verified income straight from the bank. That supports referencing and affordability checks that can't be beaten with an edited PDF, and live bank feeds for client account reconciliation.
Payouts can come from the same place. Landlord remittances, contractor payments and deposit returns can go out as bulk Faster Payments from a run the platform already calculates, to accounts it can verify.
It also puts a platform in a good position for Variable Recurring Payments. Commercial VRPs went live through the UK Payments Initiative in June 2026 for a first group of sectors, and more are expected to follow. A platform that already has open banking built in will be ready to offer authorise-once recurring rent when the scheme widens.
Put all of that together and the platform stops being a record of payments made somewhere else and becomes the place where they're made.
Build it or partner?
A handful of large platforms might consider becoming payment institutions themselves. For most, that means FCA authorisation, safeguarding, connections to the banks, uptime commitments, fraud monitoring and a support team for payment queries. That's a big, permanent cost.
Working with a regulated open banking provider gets to the same place faster. The platform owns the experience and the data, and the provider holds the permissions and the bank connections. The real decision is which provider, and whether they can handle collection, data and payouts together or only one of them.
The commercial side
Embedding payments improves the product, but it also changes a platform's economics. Payment volume can bring in revenue that grows with the customer base, on top of subscriptions. An agency whose rent collection, payouts and referencing all run through one platform is much less likely to leave it. And while most features can be copied in a release or two, a payments and data layer that agents use every day is much harder to replicate.
Where we come in
Fena is an FCA-regulated open banking provider, and we cover the three things a property platform needs in a single integration: pay by bank collection through payment links, QR codes and recurring payments, consented account information for verification and bank feeds, and bulk payouts. We're not the largest provider in the UK, and we won't pretend otherwise. What you get is a partner with direct access to the people who built the product and who make the commercial decisions.
If your platform still sends agents to a reconciliation screen every week, we'd be glad to talk about changing that.
To talk about embedding payments, email sales@fena.co.
Article by
Gosia Furmanik
CEO and Founder
Published on
