National Australia Bank (NAB) announced on May 14, 2026 that it had acquired Banked, a payments technology company founded in London in 2018. Banked runs a Pay by Bank and payments orchestration platform that lets merchants take payments straight from a customer's bank account instead of by card. NAB did not disclose the price.
NAB was already a minority shareholder. Its venture fund, NAB Ventures, invested in Banked's funding rounds in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The deal gives the bank full ownership of the company.
For now, the Banked group of companies will operate as wholly owned subsidiaries of NAB. The bank said it plans to bring Banked into its own technology systems over the coming months.
What Banked built
Banked's platform handles account-to-account payments, in which money moves directly between the payer's and the merchant's bank accounts. NAB said this can be cheaper and faster than card payments and settles in real time. Banked also provides a digital checkout that merchants can put in front of customers.
The orchestration side of the platform routes payments across different bank networks. Pulse 2.0 and other trade outlets reported that Banked's orchestration technology had also been adopted by Bank of America, Citi and FIS.
NAB has used Banked's technology for its own business customers since 2024.
“Customers expect making payments to be fast, easy and reliable, and Banked helps us deliver that,”
Why NAB is buying
NAB said the deal fits its plan to build up account-to-account and real-time payment options for business customers. Shane Conway, NAB's group executive for transformation, said customers expect payments to be fast, easy and reliable, and that Banked helps the bank provide that. He also said Pay by Bank was part of a wider move in Australia towards real-time, account-to-account payments.
The bank plans to combine Banked's product and engineering teams with its own scale and payments infrastructure. The aim is a simpler payments process for merchants, covering everything from checkout to reconciliation and settlement.
Brad Goodall, Banked's co-founder and chief executive, said NAB's backing would let the platform reach more customers.
The founders and the funding
Goodall co-founded Banked in 2018. In 2022 the company raised an oversubscribed Series A led by Bank of America. Later that year it extended the round with Insight Partners as lead and Citi, NAB Ventures and payments company Rapyd taking part, according to law firm Willkie, which advised Insight Partners. That extension took Banked's total funding to more than $50 million and was meant to pay for expansion into new markets, especially the United States.
NAB Ventures then took part in further rounds in 2023 and 2024. The sizes of those rounds were not reported in the sources reviewed, and NAB did not say what stake it held before the full acquisition.
Goodall said in NAB's announcement that the bank's support would help Banked reach more customers, and told Broker News that Banked offers merchants a faster and cheaper way to get paid. Broker News reported that NAB had offered Banked's Pay by Bank product to Australian businesses since 2024.
What happens to customers
NAB did not say whether Banked would continue to serve merchants and banks outside Australia under its own brand after integration, and did not give figures for Banked's revenue, transaction volume or headcount.
Fintech Futures described the deal as NAB taking full ownership of a long-term open banking partner. Broker News reported that NAB declined to comment on the purchase price.
The bank said that, in the near term, it would keep Banked's corporate structure intact while it works out the integration. The combined goal, according to NAB, is to join Banked's product and engineering teams with NAB's existing payments business so that merchants can handle checkout, reconciliation and settlement in one flow.
The deal was announced the same day NAB set out changes to how it accounts for technology spending, Broker News reported. The bank said it would shorten the useful life of capitalised software and raise its capitalisation threshold from A$5 million to A$20 million (about $3.3 million to $13 million), leading to a one-off pre-tax amortisation charge of A$1,347 million (about $880 million) in the first half of its 2026 financial year.
