a UK payments team, a 2020 platform
CoralCommerce as a brand and a platform launched in 2020, but the people behind it did not start there. Long before CoralCommerce existed, its founding team was already working inside UK payments, building the systems, relationships and regulatory understanding that a mature, card-first, increasingly real-time market like the UK demands. CoralCommerce is where two decades of that experience were brought together into a single orchestration product, not a start-up's first attempt at payments.
That matters in a market like the UK, where merchants and their advisers can tell the difference between a platform that has read about Faster Payments and BACS, and one built by people who have actually operated within them.
orchestration, not custody
In the UK, holding or moving client funds requires authorisation as a payment institution or e-money institution under the Payment Services Regulations 2017, regulated by the FCA. CoralCommerce does not do this. We sit above that regulated layer, orchestrating the routing, logic and reporting across licensed banks, acquirers and payment institutions, while every pound continues to move through those authorised parties, not through us.
the same orchestration-only model we run in Africa, the Americas and Asia applies at home in the UK. we are the routing and reporting layer above a regulated payments stack, never a participant inside it.
Faster Payments, BACS, and a real-time-first market
The UK's domestic payment rails are distinctive and mature. Faster Payments moves retail bank transfers in seconds, around the clock, and has done since 2008, long before real-time payments became a global trend. BACS still underpins the UK's Direct Debit culture, the default way subscriptions and recurring bills are collected. CHAPS handles high-value, same-day transfers. Cards remain dominant at the point of sale and online, and Open Banking, mandated in the UK since 2018, has made account-to-account payments a genuine checkout option, not a novelty.
A UK business accepting all of these alongside international cards still needs one place to route between them, reconcile settlement, and fail over when a rail is unavailable. That coordination is what orchestration adds on top of rails that, individually, already work well.
a small step into Europe: PSD2, SCA and SEPA
CoralCommerce's connectors are built PSD2 SCA compliant from the ground up, 3DS v2.2 frictionless and challenge flows, open banking account-to-account payments, and card acquiring across the UK and EEA, with GDPR compliant data handling throughout. For UK businesses trading into the eurozone, that includes SEPA reach for euro-denominated transfers, orchestrated alongside domestic UK rails rather than as a separate, bolted-on integration.