Switching payment provider: a complete guide

Changing payment provider is four jobs running at the same time: ending one contract, moving your direct debit mandates, rebuilding your collection schedule on the new side, and telling your customers. Bacs scheme rules protect the mandates. Your contract decides what leaving costs you, and that's the part most people check last.

In this article

The short version

• Bacs's own switching guide says it "does not cover the contractual relationship between the client and the FM provider, as this is outside the scope of the Direct Debit Rules". The scheme moves your mandates and says nothing about your exit fee.
• Since 1 January 2018 an outgoing facilities-management provider has been required by scheme rules to co-operate with a bulk change asked for by you or your new provider.
• Access PaySuite's pricing page says "No commitment", while the Terms and Conditions V5 it publishes alongside, dated April 2026, set a 12-month initial term, 90 days' notice and an early termination fee equal to "the previous three months invoiced by Us".
• GoCardless publishes the best exit position in this market: monthly rolling contracts, no notice period, no exit fee on the page, and a contractual right to a bulk change deed plus "a machine-readable list of each of your Customers and their Payment Scheme Mandate details", at clause 7.1.
• Bacs anticipates the switching procedures taking "approximately four to six weeks", the only migration timescale the scheme publishes.
• Your customers sign nothing new under the Bacs bulk change, and they sign a new mandate on the other route, with no scheme rule deciding which of those you get.

The order the work happens in

The five workstreams below don't run in parallel as neatly as a plan suggests. Check the contract first, because it can move your timing by a quarter. The migration takes the longest calendar time and the least of your attention, while the rebuild on the new side takes almost no calendar time and most of your attention, so people leave it too late.

Bacs is clear about who runs the migration: the process "is likely to commence when a client identifies its chosen new FM provider who will generally drive the process". Stripe says the same about itself, that "Your new payment processor is responsible for initiating the bulk change process with their Bacs sponsor bank". So you own the contract, the customer message and the rebuild, and the scheme paperwork happens between two providers and two banks on a timetable neither fully controls.

Your contract, and what the scheme leaves alone

One sentence in the Bacs switching guide explains more about switching costs than the rest of the scheme's public material. The guide "does not cover the contractual relationship between the client and the FM provider, as this is outside the scope of the Direct Debit Rules".

The Bacs Direct Debit Facilities Management guide v5.0 of February 2025 then tells you two things in the same breath. "The existing FM provider is required by Direct Debit scheme rules to agree to use the BCP when requested to do so by the new FM provider or the FM client." And Pay.UK "expects the existing provider to support the FM client as they make this change subject to any contractual obligations".

Those last six words carry a lot. Your provider can co-operate fully with the mechanism that moves your mandates and still invoice you for a year of fees you weren't planning to pay. The decision behind the co-operation duty, PSR PS17/3 of December 2017, took effect on 1 January 2018 and required the operator to "ensure that FM service providers that wish to do so can use the Bacs bulk change process to help clients who wish to switch to/from another provider". It raises contractual obligations and unsettled indemnity claims as candidate exceptions without closing the list, so the scheme contemplates limited exceptions and doesn't set them out exhaustively.

Indemnity liability moves with the mandates too. Once the instructions transfer, "the responsibility for the settlement of Indemnity Claims rests with the new FM provider… covers all past, present, and future Indemnity Claims" (Bacs FM v5.0), which the deed repeats at clauses 2.1 and 3.1. That liability stays with you where your customers sign new mandates instead.

What each provider publishes about leaving

Everything below comes from each provider's own published documents. Where a cell says not published, that's a statement about their website and not a claim about what their contract says.

Access PaySuite's direct debit pricing page says "No setup fees" and "No commitment". Its Terms and Conditions V5 of April 2026, the only document linked from its own terms page, set a 12-month initial term, 90 days' notice, an early termination fee "equal to the previous three months invoiced by Us prior to any bulk cancellation" and a right to "increase all Fees annually". Read the PDF before you rely on the pricing page, because the two documents answer the same question differently.

Kolleno's terms of 12 May 2023 set an "initial term of 24 (twenty four) months" with fees that are "non-cancellable and non-refundable". A two-year commitment doesn't need an exit fee to make leaving expensive.

Bottomline publishes the notice period and the penalty formula but not the term they attach to. Its BPS Master Customer Agreement of January 2025 gives you 90 days' notice, defines liquidated damages for short notice on Managed Payment Services, and lets Bottomline retain up to the money it holds for you "for a period of up to 12 calendar months from termination". The Initial Term lives in a private Order Form, so your own exposure isn't calculable from what's published.

London & Zurich publishes no customer terms at all: the terms URL 404s, the privacy policy is blocked to crawlers, and three approaches found no service agreement. Its switching page does tell you that "you will need to approach your current Direct Debit provider, and ask them to release the data behind all the Direct Debits", so you can read what they expect your old provider to hand over and not what they'll hand over.

Then GoCardless, and this needs saying plainly on a page that argues for moving away from them. On published exit terms they're the best in this market. The General Terms run until either side ends the agreement, with no minimum period, and you end it "by following the instructions and meeting the criteria listed on the Dashboard", with any transactions already taken "processed in full". The pricing page calls Standard, Advanced and Pro "monthly rolling contracts" and says you "can change your plan or close your GoCardless account whenever you like". Clause 7.1 of the Bank Debit Terms commits them to help you move, including "entering into a bulk change deed" and "a machine-readable list of each of your Customers and their Payment Scheme Mandate details via a secure transfer mechanism". Of eleven providers, three publish a data-export clause at all, and this is the strongest of the three.

Two qualifiers appear in the same documents: the list arrives once the sponsor bank has approved the transfer, and under clause 11.2 you "will not be automatically entitled to be paid" any funds GoCardless holds until it's satisfied what you owe has been paid. Neither document carries a version or effective date, and nor do most terms in the table.

Stripe is the mirror image: strong process documentation, no contractual data right. Section 4.4 of its Services Agreement says "Stripe is not obligated to retain data that it receives from or through User after the Term", subject to a short list of exceptions. Its export page describes a Bacs export taking "approximately 6-8 weeks", with Stripe providing a signed bulk change deed and no charge stated. Read only the contract and you wouldn't know the process existed.

Two related pieces go with this one. Our page on what £300 a month with GoCardless implies about your volume and invoice size works the arithmetic through from published rates, and our 2026 roundups of all-in-one payments and credit control platforms and of payment platforms for accountancy firms record who publishes a price and who does not.

What happens to your mandates

Two routes exist, and your customers experience them differently.

The Bacs Direct Debit Bulk Change Process moves your existing instructions across, and your customers sign nothing new. The scheme's glossary defines it as "The rules and processes a service user must follow when applying bulk amendments to Direct Debit Instructions (DDIs), already held with paying PSP's, in respect of a change of name, legal status, service user number or service user reference". Changing provider qualifies because it changes the service user number your collections run under.

The other route is a fresh mandate. Every customer signs again, with no deed, no sponsor-bank co-ordination and no four-to-six-week wait, and the cost is that some of them won't sign. The PSR heard as much from a business in 2017, whose customers "perceived that they had already signed a DDI and so to request a new one would confuse them", in its August 2017 consultation.

No Bacs document publishes a minimum number of mandates for a bulk change, and nor does GoCardless, Stripe, London & Zurich or Access PaySuite. Any minimum you're quoted is that provider's own operational policy. Our companion article on what happens to your mandates works through all three of the scheme's published switching options, and the piece on re-signing after leaving GoCardless takes the customer-facing question on its own.

Telling your customers, and what they see

The scheme's public guidance on notifying payers is one sentence long: communicate "clearly and in plenty of time before anything happens", because it "may reduce the number of customer enquiries". No number appears anywhere in the guide.

The market can't agree on a number either, for a structural reason: your payer notice period is registered against your service user number, not fixed by the scheme. The Bacs glossary gives the default as "10 working days plus postal time", GoCardless publishes 3 days for its own collections, and Stripe publishes 2 working days and tells migrating businesses to notify payers "in accordance with the Advance Notice Period in your current SUN".

Operationally, everyone agrees on one thing: the wording has to be pre-approved by a sponsor bank. GoCardless and Stripe both supply a Bacs-approved template, and Stripe tells you to wait for final sponsor-bank approval before you send it. London & Zurich sends the notification itself, and so does Adfin, on the change date and in your branding.

What your customer sees on their statement afterwards depends on which service user number you land on, and most migration pages skip it. GoCardless describes a bulk change as allowing "the merchant name, reference and SUN on a mandate to be changed", and charges £50 a month on top of your plan for "Your name on bank statements". Stripe publishes the same split: a free shared SUN "that uses the Stripe name and branch on statements", or a Custom SUN for a monthly fee. Bacs FM v5.0 is explicit that under a single-SUN model only the provider's name appears in the record. So move onto a shared service user number and your customers see an unfamiliar name on the first collection after the change date, so say so in the notice you send them.

Your collection schedule doesn't travel

A mandate is authority to collect. It carries no amounts, no dates, no invoices and no fee changes, so whichever route your mandates take, you rebuild the instructions to collect on the new side. Reconcile your customer list against your mandate list while you're there, because a bulk change moves whatever you give it, duplicates included.

Stripe is the only provider here that publishes the file schema for a Bacs migration, and reading it is the quickest way to find out whether your data is ready. Required fields run from the old customer ID and name through sort code, account number, email address and postal address. Email is required: "Stripe requires your customer's email so we can send out notifications". A book of mandates with gaps in the email column is a migration problem before it's anything else.

What changes in your reconciliation

The first month after a switch looks unfamiliar even when everything has worked.

Your reference can change. A bulk change updates the reference on the mandate, so the string your bank statement shows against a collection may not match what your ledger matched on last month. If you reconcile by reference, check the new format before the first collection lands.

Your settlement shape can change. Bacs clears a direct debit over a three-day cycle whoever you collect through, but providers differ on how the fee comes out: GoCardless deducts its fees from your submitted payments, so the payout arrives net, while Adfin settles gross and invoices the fee separately. Build a reconciliation rule that expects a net figure and it'll break quietly when the shape changes.

And your collection dates around the change date move, as the next section covers. If you are consolidating at the same time, our pieces on whether one platform can do invoicing, direct debit and card payments, and on what it costs to run payments and chasing as two systems, take those decisions separately.

What can delay a switch

Four failure modes are documented on providers' own pages, so they're predictable.

1. Missing the data cut-off. The consequence GoCardless publishes is a reschedule: "If you miss the cutoff for uploading your data, unfortunately we won't be able to complete the bulk change on the agreed date and will need to reschedule it".
2. The submission window closing. On GoCardless's own timeline you submit final payments 2 working days before the change date and can submit under the new service user number 3 working days after, and its bulk-change-away article advises you to "stop collecting payments 5-7 days prior to the bulk change date". London & Zurich requires "a 10 day clear window of no Direct Debit activity" before your first collection with them. No invoice has to go uncollected, but the dates move.
3. Mandates that don't make it across. A paying bank can reject a new instruction on the transfer-of-all-DDIs route, and the published record on how you find out is thin. Only Stripe and Adfin address it at all.
4. Invoicing through both systems at once. Adfin's own guidance is to hold off issuing invoices through Adfin for customers still being migrated, and the same logic holds whichever pair of providers you're between.

Sponsor-bank timing sits behind all four: GoCardless attributes its 3 to 5 week range for a bulk change away to "the response time of the involved sponsor banks", and both it and Stripe make the timetable conditional on two banks agreeing.

Common questions

How long does switching direct debit provider take? Bacs anticipates the basic switching procedures taking "approximately four to six weeks", the only timescale the scheme publishes. Providers' own timetables run from three to eight weeks, and both GoCardless and Stripe blame sponsor-bank response times for the variation.

Can my current provider stop me leaving? Not from using the mechanism. Since 1 January 2018 an outgoing facilities-management provider has been required by scheme rules to co-operate with a bulk change requested by you or your new provider. The scheme contemplates limited exceptions and doesn't set them out exhaustively, and none of that affects what your contract charges you.

Will my customers have to sign a new mandate? Not if the migration goes through the Bacs bulk change, where the existing authorisations carry over. Under the other route each customer signs a new mandate. No scheme document sets a mandate count that decides which route applies, so ask your incoming provider what its own policy is.

What does it cost to leave? Whatever your contract says. GoCardless publishes no minimum term, no notice and no exit fee. Access PaySuite's terms set 12 months, 90 days' notice and a fee equal to the previous three months invoiced, and Bottomline can hold your funds for up to 12 months after termination. No provider here publishes a fee for the bulk change itself.

Will collections stop while we switch? No invoice needs to go uncollected, but the collection dates around the change date move. Published quiet windows run from about four working days to ten days, so plan your billing calendar around the change date.

Will my customers see a different name on their statement? If you land on your provider's shared service user number, yes, from the first collection after the change date. With your own service user number, or with own-name branding, your name continues to show. GoCardless charges £50 a month for that, and Stripe prices it as Custom Branding.

Sources

• Bacs — the little Bacs guide to switching FM providers (accurate as of August 2026)
• Bacs — Direct Debit Facilities Management v5.0 (accurate as of August 2026)
• Bacs — Direct Debit bulk change deed (accurate as of August 2026)
• Bacs — glossary (accurate as of August 2026)
• Payment Systems Regulator — CP17/1, Direct Debit facilities management (accurate as of August 2026)
• Payment Systems Regulator — PS17/3, Direct Debit facilities management (accurate as of August 2026)
• Access PaySuite — direct debit pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Access PaySuite — terms and conditions V5, April 2026 (accurate as of August 2026)
• Bottomline — BPS Master Customer Agreement, January 2025 (accurate as of August 2026)
• GoCardless — Bank Debit Terms (accurate as of August 2026)
• GoCardless — bulk changing away from GoCardless (accurate as of August 2026)
• GoCardless — General Terms (accurate as of August 2026)
• GoCardless — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Kolleno — terms of service (accurate as of August 2026)
• London & Zurich — how to change your direct debit provider (accurate as of August 2026)
• Stripe — Bacs Direct Debit, export data (accurate as of August 2026)
• Stripe — Bacs Direct Debit, import data (accurate as of August 2026)
• Stripe — Services Agreement (accurate as of August 2026)

This article describes what Bacs, the Payment Systems Regulator and named providers publish about switching payment provider, and is not legal or financial advice. Two of the three Bacs documents containing the bulk change rules are behind a Bacs login, so anything not quoted from a public scheme page is described as what a provider publishes. Contract terms change, so check the current document before relying on it. Last updated August 2026.