What are Variable Recurring Payments? (VRP)

VRPs or Variable Recurring Payments are a way of making payments using bank APIs, and present a cheaper and more secure alternative to Direct Debits and card-on-file for recurring payments.

VRPs allow a payment service user to give consent to a regulated third-party provider to make payments from their account based on restrictions such as payment amount and number of payments allowed.

One of the primary use cases for VRP is ‘sweeping’, where funds are automatically transferred between two accounts held by the same user. For example, automatically moving money from a savings payment account to their current account to avoid overdraft fees).