The bank charges 1.4% plus 5p per contactless payment and follows Lloyds in offering Stripe-powered acceptance through a business banking app.
HSBC UK has launched a Tap to Pay service for small business customers, powered by Stripe, which lets sole traders and small firms accept contactless payments on a compatible smartphone without buying a separate card reader.
Customers set up the service through the HSBC Business Banking app, where they apply for a Stripe account, and can then take contactless debit and credit cards as well as digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
HSBC UK charges 1.4% plus 5p per transaction, according to its product page, with payments reaching the merchant’s HSBC account three working days later. The first payout can take seven to 14 days because of security checks, and the service only works for payments taken in the UK.
HSBC UK tied the launch to research, conducted by Censuswide among 594 small business owners with turnover below £2m, which found 33% had lost a sale because they could not accept a customer’s preferred payment method.
“Nobody wants to lose a sale because a customer cannot make a payment,” said Gavin Maclean, Head of Global Payment Solutions UK at HSBC. “For a small business, every purchase matters, and an awkward few minutes at the till can be the difference between making a sale and watching somebody walk away. Tap to Pay gives sole traders and businesses an additional, simple way to take payments using their phone.”
Marc Fryer, Head of Revenue and Growth UK & Ireland at Stripe, added: “Small businesses drive the UK economy, but payment admin slows them down. We can take that hassle away and give them better ways to get paid so they can focus on growing.”
Lloyds and HSBC bring Stripe into business banking
HSBC UK follows Lloyds, which in June became the first traditional UK bank to partner with Stripe, according to Stripe, when it launched Lloyds Accept. Lloyds Accept offers Tap to Pay alongside payment links and card terminals to the bank’s more than one million business customers.
Digital bank Monzo also gives its business customers Tap to Pay on iPhone through Stripe, while NatWest built phone-based acceptance for its Tyl merchant service with Ingenico‘s Phos.
Merchant take-up of phone-based acceptance has grown quickly. Visa reported in March 2025 adoption of its Tap to Phone service rose 200% year on year, with the US, UK and Brazil growing by a combined 234%.
Part of that growth comes from businesses that did not take cards before. New small businesses made up nearly 30% of Visa’s Tap to Phone sellers, and Visa said merchants moving from cash-only to digital payments drove adoption, particularly in cash-dominant markets.
Stripe has reported a similar pattern, saying more than half of early adopters of its Tap to Pay product had not previously used a Stripe card reader.
Each of those merchants adds volume for the card networks, because every payment taken on a Tap to Pay phone is a card transaction. Stripe’s Tap to Pay accepts Visa, Mastercard and American Express cards and the digital wallets that carry them.
UK contactless card payments totalled 19.2 billion in 2025, out of 49.7 billion UK payments, according to UK Finance‘s UK Payment Markets 2026 report, which forecasts 26 billion contactless payments, or 41% of the total, by 2035.
The cost of accepting those payments includes scheme and processing fees, which the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) found in March 2025 that Visa and Mastercard had raised by at least 25% since 2017, costing businesses at least £170m a year.
PSR directions on fee transparency and pricing governance came into force in July, and the pricing governance requirements take effect on 30 November.
The Bank of England is working on an alternative at the same point of sale. Its Retail Payments Infrastructure Board consulted until 11 September on the design of the UK’s next-generation payments infrastructure, including account-to-account payments in shops as an option alongside cards.
