Payments provider EchoPay has introduced a merchant toolkit that pairs commercial card surcharging with pay-by-bank functionality, giving builders', electrical, plumbing and timber merchants two separate ways to offset the cost of card acceptance. The provider is pitching the combination as giving merchants back some control over margin that card processing fees have been eroding.
Commercial card surcharging lets a merchant pass on the processing fee for business/commercial cards at the point of sale rather than absorbing it, while pay-by-bank offers customers a lower-cost account-to-account payment route as an alternative to card altogether. Run together, the idea is that a merchant can steer transaction costs down without simply raising prices across the board.
Why this matters for UK trades
Builders' merchants operate on thin margins, and card processing costs have been a growing line item as trade accounts and one-off purchases increasingly move to card and app-based payment. A toolkit that lets a merchant branch either recover surcharge costs on commercial cards or nudge customers toward cheaper bank transfers is a direct margin lever, not just a back-office tweak.
For tradespeople buying on account or in branch, the practical impact will depend on how individual merchants choose to deploy it: some may apply surcharges to commercial card payments, others may lean on pay-by-bank incentives instead. Either way, it's worth watching how your regular merchant branches implement this, since it could change the cheapest way to pay at the till.
No pricing, rollout timeline, or list of adopting merchant groups has been published yet.
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