PayFacto adds Interac Konek to its Canadian merchant platform

PayFacto is integrating Interac’s Konek digital wallet across its Canadian merchant and partner networks, giving businesses the option to offer account-based payments alongside cards. The PayFacto Interac Konek integration, announced by Interac on October 29, applies through PayFacto’s platform for payments, point of sale and digital commerce.

The announcement did not disclose how many merchants have activated the option or are live at checkout. PayFacto said Konek would be available to its merchants as well as its technology and channel partners, while availability to shoppers depends on merchant acceptance.

How does Konek work at PayFacto online checkout?

PayFacto’s technical documentation describes Konek as a payment method within its API v2.0 Secure Hosted Checkout solution. A shopper choosing the pay-by-bank option is sent to their own online-banking portal, where they authenticate and approve the payment. PayFacto then returns a confirmed payment result to the merchant.

The company says Konek is presented alongside card payment choices rather than requiring a separate merchant integration. In the documented flow, shoppers do not enter card credentials for a direct bank-account payment. PayFacto says the wallet tokenizes account or card information, so merchants do not receive those numbers. With the shopper’s consent, Interac can provide a name, telephone number and shipping address needed to fulfil an order.

Konek can support eligible debit-card, credit-card and direct bank-account payments, depending on merchant acceptance and participation by financial institutions, according to Interac. Payments made directly from chequing or savings accounts use Interac Direct, which Interac says is available exclusively through Konek.

What does the rollout mean for merchants?

Interac says Konek is designed to reduce acceptance costs compared with most conventional card payments when customers pay directly from a bank account. It also says issuer fraud liability applies to eligible fraud losses, shifting responsibility from the merchant to the issuer. Those are product-design and cost claims from Interac, rather than independently reported merchant outcomes.

PayFacto is the second processor or platform named in an Interac Konek distribution announcement in recent weeks. On September 29, Interac said Global Payments would enable Konek for its Canadian merchant network, beginning with its API before extending to built-in online checkout and hosted-payment products.

Interac characterises Konek as an e-commerce wallet backed by leading Canadian financial institutions. The PayFacto rollout expands the wallet’s potential distribution, but the companies have not provided transaction volumes, pricing, a timetable or a list of participating PayFacto merchants.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.