They are two unrelated companies with confusable names, and both of them collect Bacs Direct Debit, so the usual shorthand about one doing direct debit and the other doing bank connectivity won't help you. What decides it is the Service User Number. AccessPay expects you to arrive holding your own SUN and bank sponsorship. Access PaySuite will collect under its own if you haven't got one.
In this article
Why these two get mixed up
The names alone would do it, but two harder reasons sit underneath.
Both companies appear in the same Pay.UK Directory of Bacs Approved Bureaux, dated 3 July 2026, a line or two apart in an alphabetical listing. Access Systems (UK) Limited is there at City Tower, Piccadilly Plaza, Manchester. Access PaySuite Limited is there at The Armstrong Building, Oakwood Drive, Loughborough, with four separate entries under four brand websites. Meet both names in one document and you meet them in the same list of bureaux.
Then the trap, which tends to catch people at the moment they try to verify anything. AccessPay's legal entity is "Access Systems (UK) Limited", a name that reads like a member of The Access Group, and The Access Group is Access PaySuite's actual parent. No corporate relationship exists between the two on the public record. So checking Companies House to tell them apart can push you deeper into the mistake instead of out of it. Neither company helps you: no disambiguation notice, no footnote, no page. Every result pairing the two names belongs to somebody else, and you can confirm that absence in two clicks.
The two companies on the public record
Companies House records for 08033029 and 04595169, plus each company's own pages.
Both of them collect direct debit
If you've read that AccessPay doesn't do direct debit, its own pages say otherwise. Its Bacs page sells "automated and scalable Direct Debit collections" and "Automated and secure BACS payments via our BACS-approved solution", and names Direct Credits too. Beyond Bacs it publishes Faster Payments, CHAPS, SWIFT L2BA, SEPA, host-to-host and API connectivity, and ISO 20022 support.
What differs is the buyer. AccessPay describes itself as "The UK's leading payment automation & data transformation platform for the Office of the CFO and Treasury teams", with insurers and building societies among the customers on its homepage. Access PaySuite calls itself "a leading UK-based, FCA regulated provider of payment solutions" and says it "supports more than 6,000 customers" and "transacts more than £23 billion in payment volume every year". Different buyer, same scheme, so a comparison built on "one does collections, the other does connectivity" describes a distinction that doesn't exist.
The distinction that decides it: who holds the SUN
AccessPay's own Bacs FAQ puts the requirement plainly:
"To submit Bacs payments through AccessPay, you must have sponsorship from your bank in the form of a Service User Number (SUN)."
AccessPay is software you point at your own bank relationships. It assumes you've been through sponsorship already, or that you will, and prices a subscription for the software.
Access PaySuite starts at the other end and gives you three models on its direct debit page: your own assigned SUN through its bureau, so "your name will show up on your customer bank statements"; the bureau's SUN under a facilities-managed service, where "your customers will see the bureau's name on their statements, rather than yours"; or direct file submission to Bacs.
So you have a clean test. If you hold a SUN and a sponsoring bank, both companies are worth a conversation. If you haven't got one and don't want the sponsorship process, the providers to look at are the ones that collect under somebody else's SUN: Access PaySuite, GoCardless, London & Zurich, or Adfin, which publishes this article.
What each one costs, as far as either publishes it
AccessPay publishes no price on its own website and accesspay.com/pricing returns a 404. It publishes a model instead: "At AccessPay, we'll never charge per transaction. Instead, we offer a fixed annual subscription model."
You can find numbers elsewhere, though, and they're public. AccessPay's own G-Cloud 14 pricing document, dated 3 May 2024 and published on the government's Digital Marketplace, lists annual platform fees of £2,000 for "UK Domestic Payments - Bacs Direct Credit & Direct Debit (includes 2 users)", £800 for "Faster Payments DCA", £15,000 for "SWIFT Connectivity", £5,000 per "Host-to-Host" bank connection, and set-up "Calculated at 25% of total annual subscription fee". Read those as a two-year-old public-sector framework rate and not as a current quote.
Access PaySuite prices per transaction: "From 8p per transaction", "No setup fees", and a worked example where "a business processing 500 payments/month at £30 average transaction value would pay around £215/month". Its SmartDebit brand page said "transaction fees from just 4p" the same day, and 500 payments at 8p is £40, so that £215 example carries roughly £175 a month the page doesn't itemise. So ask them to itemise the whole figure in writing.
Regulatory and scheme status
Access PaySuite states on its accreditations page that it is "authorised and regulated as a Payment Institution by the FCA, Firm Reference Number: 730815", and repeats the number in its privacy policy. That's the reference the company publishes about itself, and we can't tell you which entity in the group holds it, because the FCA register wouldn't render for us.
AccessPay states no FCA authorisation on its legal notices, its about page or its terms PDF. You can't establish from its own material whether it's authorised, registered or neither, so put that on your question list instead of reading it either way.
Access PaySuite also claims "the highest inspection level, rated Excellent across all 5 key areas" for its Bacs accreditation. Pay.UK's directory publishes contact details and no ratings for anybody, so that's the company's own claim and you can't check it against the scheme.
Contract terms, where both publish
On notice periods, AccessPay's terms are the friendlier of the two. Its terms PDF contracts with "Access Systems (UK) Limited... with a company number 08033029" and renews each schedule "automatically... for successive periods of 12 months" unless a party gives notice "at least 30 days before the end".
Access PaySuite's Terms and Conditions V5 of April 2026 set a 12-month initial term, "not less than 90 days' prior Notice" to end it, an early termination fee "equal to the previous three months invoiced by Us prior to any bulk cancellation", and a reserve of "a minimum of 25% of the average monthly Client Collections" held for at least six months after you go. Its pricing page says "No commitment", and that page and those terms are both Access PaySuite's own documents, so read the two together.
What you can't find out
Common questions
No, and nothing on the public record connects them. AccessPay is Access Systems (UK) Limited, company 08033029, incorporated in Manchester in 2012 and majority-owned by Accel-KKR since 31 March 2026. Access PaySuite Ltd is company 04595169, incorporated in 2002 as Eazy Collect Services Limited and part of The Access Group.
Yes. Its own Bacs page sells "automated and scalable Direct Debit collections" and Bacs Direct Credits, alongside Faster Payments, CHAPS and SWIFT. Both companies are Bacs Approved Bureaux in Pay.UK's Directory of 3 July 2026, so a comparison telling you only one of them does direct debit doesn't match what either company publishes.
Access PaySuite, or another provider collecting under its own SUN. AccessPay's Bacs FAQ requires you to "have sponsorship from your bank in the form of a Service User Number (SUN)", so sponsorship comes first with them. Access PaySuite offers you its bureau's SUN, your own, or direct file submission.
No. Its legal name, Access Systems (UK) Limited, reads as though it might be, and The Access Group is the parent of Access PaySuite instead. AccessPay's majority shareholder has been Accel-KKR since 31 March 2026. This is the detail most likely to mislead you when you go to verify who you're dealing with.
It publishes no price on its own site and says "we'll never charge per transaction. Instead, we offer a fixed annual subscription model." Its G-Cloud 14 pricing document of 3 May 2024, on the government's Digital Marketplace, lists £2,000 a year for Bacs, £15,000 for SWIFT connectivity, £5,000 per host-to-host bank connection and set-up at 25% of the annual fee. That's a 2024 framework rate, so ask them for a current quote.
Access PaySuite publishes that it is "authorised and regulated as a Payment Institution by the FCA, Firm Reference Number: 730815". AccessPay publishes no FCA statement on its legal notices, about page or terms, so its status isn't established from its own material in either direction and you'd want to ask.
Sources
Company details come from Companies House records for 08033029 and 04595169 and from each company's own published pages. Scheme listings come from Pay.UK's Directory of Bacs Approved Bureaux of 3 July 2026, which publishes no accreditation ratings. Access PaySuite's pricing comes from its own pricing page, and AccessPay's from its G-Cloud 14 document of 3 May 2024, a public-sector framework rate and not a current quote. Neither company publishes anything about the confusion, so nothing here is attributed to either about the other. Last updated August 2026.
