London & Zurich collects direct debit for UK businesses with thirty years behind it and a UK team you can ring. What you can't do is read its contract, because it publishes no customer terms at all, and its pricing carries no cap. If either of those matters to you, six alternatives publish more: Access PaySuite, Adfin, Bottomline, GoCardless, Modulr and Stripe.
In this article
Why businesses look for a London & Zurich alternative
Three things send people looking, and you can check each one on London & Zurich's own site in a couple of clicks.
You can't read the contract. Their /terms-and-conditions/ page returns a 404, the privacy policy is blocked by robots.txt, and a search for a service agreement turns up nothing. Their "Switch to us" page covers none of it: no re-signing, no collection gaps, no term, no exit fee, no setup fee. The only timescale you get is "1-3 weeks from your initial payment" to go live. Silence isn't evidence of bad terms, but you can't find out either way.
There's no published cap. Foundation is "Pricing around 1%" and Business "from 0.5% or 20p", and no tier carries a ceiling. If your fee notes run into the thousands, you're buying a different cost shape from a capped one.
And your money reaches you second. Under their managed service "customer payments are credited to our London & Zurich account, and we will transfer the funds to your organisation as fast as possible", with no settlement timescale published.
At a glance: the six compared
Each figure is the provider's own published pricing. Exit terms come from each provider's own published contract.
1. Access PaySuite
The payments arm of The Access Group, and the home of SmartDebit and EaziPay. Its accreditations page states it is "authorised and regulated as a Payment Institution by the FCA, Firm Reference Number: 730815". Like London & Zurich, it will collect under a bureau SUN if you haven't got one, or submit under yours, with cards alongside.
Pricing: "From 8p per transaction" for smaller businesses, "No setup fees", "No commitment", and a worked example where "a business processing 500 payments/month at £30 average transaction value would pay around £215/month". The SmartDebit brand page said "transaction fees from just 4p".
Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 out of 5 from 346 reviews (ca.trustpilot.com), user-reported. Their own site displayed 4.7 from 369.
Limitation: their own pricing page says "No commitment" while their own Terms and Conditions V5 of April 2026 set a 12-month initial term, 90 days' notice, an early termination fee equal to the previous three months invoiced, and a reserve of "a minimum of 25% of the average monthly Client Collections" held for at least six months after you leave.
2. Adfin
A UK platform that invoices, collects by direct debit, card, wallet, open banking or bank transfer, then chases what goes unpaid. Settlement is daily on weekdays, T+3 for direct debit.
Pricing: 1.0% + 20p per successful transaction with bank payments and direct debit capped at £4, a second published tier at 1.5% + 20p, an extra 1% for premium and/or EEA cards and 2% for non-EEA cards, an extra 0.15% on the amount above £2,000 on larger direct debits, 0% + 20p for the Accountants and Bookkeepers Club, enterprise by agreement. No monthly fees, no minimums, no minimum contract length, all published at adfin.com/pricing.
Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 out of 5 from 12 reviews (ca.trustpilot.com), user-reported. A far thinner base than GoCardless's 2,369.
Limitation: no euro or dollar collection. Our pricing page states no VAT position where GoCardless states one, and we publish no data-export clause of the kind GoCardless does.
3. Bottomline
A Bacs software vendor and bureau aimed at receivables teams. Its "facilities-managed Direct Debit service caters to businesses that do not have a Service User Number (SUN) or prefer not to use theirs", it re-presents payments "where the mandate is still active", and its "Confirmation of Payee for Business" covers "over 99% of UK bank accounts". Xero and QuickBooks logos are displayed, Sage's too, with no implementation detail behind them.
Pricing: nothing published. The only calls to action are "Collect Direct Debit Payments Now" and "Get a Demo", and a guessed pricing URL returned a 404. Bottomline claims "We process over 50% of all Direct Debit/Credit transactions in the UK", which is their own unaudited figure.
Reviews: none we can cite. Trustpilot returned 403 and the G2 listing found was for a different product.
Limitation: you can't budget for it without entering a sales process. Their master terms set 90 days' notice, liquidated damages on short notice for Managed Payment Services, and a right to retain your funds "for a period of up to 12 calendar months from termination". The Initial Term lives in an Order Form that isn't public.
4. GoCardless
The largest dedicated bank-debit brand in the UK, and the strongest published exit terms in this market by a distance. Standard merchants collect on "a single Service User Number", so you need no bank sponsorship. Contracts are monthly rolling, you close the account from the dashboard, and their terms give you an express exit right to a bulk change deed plus a "machine-readable list" of your mandate details.
Pricing: Standard 1% + 20p capped at £4, Advanced 1.25% + 20p capped at £5, Pro 1.4% + 20p capped at £5.60, plus 0.3% on amounts over £2,000 outside the cap, £50 a month for your name on the payer's statement and £150 a month for a custom checkout. Prices exclude VAT and the page says "we need to charge VAT on all transaction fees invoiced to UK merchants". Their support page says "Failure fees only apply in the US, Germany and Austria".
Reviews: Trustpilot 2.5 out of 5 from 2,369 reviews (au.trustpilot.com) against G2 4.6 out of 5 from 321 reviews, both user-reported. Either score on its own gives you half the picture.
Limitation: cards aren't published on the pages we read, nothing chases an unpaid invoice, and their published G-Cloud 14 document shows a £12,000 annual platform fee that doesn't appear on the public pricing page at all.
5. Modulr
An FCA-authorised electronic money institution selling accounts, outbound payments and collections. Its collections page sells a "Flat per-collection rate" against "Costs that scale with transaction value", built around your own SUN so "Your company name appears on your customer's bank statement".
Pricing: the published plans price outbound payments, from Bronze at "£30.00 per month" for "80 Payments included" up to Platinum at "£500.00 per month" for 3,000. Direct debit collection appears in no published plan, and no figure is attached to the flat-rate claim anywhere on the site.
Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 out of 5 from 130 reviews (ca.trustpilot.com), user-reported.
Limitation: no collection price is published, and no shared or facilities-managed SUN appears on any page we read, so budget for your own SUN and the bank sponsorship behind it. Modulr may also withdraw the Direct Debit Mandate Service on "at least 2 months' notice", and may end the collection service immediately if indemnity claims exceed 2%.
6. Stripe
The broadest platform here, with "125+ payment methods" published on its payment methods page, Bacs Direct Debit among them. It publishes "99.999% historical uptime" and documents a mandate-import review where it checks your imported mandates and shares a summary for your approval. Most providers publish nothing on that, us included: our own guidance asks you to compare the arrival list yourself.
Pricing: Bacs Direct Debit 1% with a 20p minimum fee capped at £4, plus £4.00 per failed payment and £5.00 per disputed payment. UK domestic cards 1.5% + 20p, premium cards 2.8% + 20p, EEA 2.5% + 20p, "International cards" 3.15% + 20p, "+ 2% if currency conversion is required". Invoicing adds 0.4% or 0.5% per paid invoice.
Reviews: no score is quoted, because none was retrievable with a review count from a platform we could reach.
Limitation: the failure fees are worth costing out before you commit. £4.00 for one failed Bacs collection equals the whole capped fee on a £400 invoice, on our arithmetic from their two figures. Stripe's UK pricing page states no VAT position, and its subscription agreement grants no post-termination data right even though the export process is documented.
What London & Zurich does better than most of them
London & Zurich publishes "over 30 years' experience" and is "authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, authorisation number 712747". Several competitors in this market are younger than the mandates they hold, so three decades counts for something. It appears in Pay.UK's Directory of Bacs Approved Bureaux of 3 July 2026. That directory lists submission routes and contact details and publishes no ratings for anybody, so treat a listing as a description of the route and not a grade.
Then the service model, sold as the product instead of as a feature: "direct access to our friendly UK based support team", "access to a friendly expert at every stage" from sign-up to ongoing support, and an account manager named in their own customer testimonial. In a market of self-serve dashboards, a named person who answers a UK phone is a real difference, and plenty of buyers rationally prefer it.
And the one that costs them money to provide. When you migrate to them they send the Bacs Notification of Change to your payers themselves: "We will then use that to send out a Notification of Change, a Bacs-compliant communication document". Stripe makes the merchant send it and GoCardless supplies a template. They also publish the clearest operational constraint anyone in this market publishes, that "there must be a 10 day clear window of no Direct Debit activity before the first collection date with your new Direct Debit provider".
They publish no customer contract, though, so you can hear all of that from someone you like and still not read what you're agreeing to, what notice you owe, or what happens to your mandate list when you leave. Their migration page tells you to "approach your current Direct Debit provider, and ask them to release the data behind all the Direct Debits", and says nothing about what they release when you go the other way.
What nobody here publishes
The absences matter to your budget as much as the prices, and comparison pages tend to skip them.
What you can find out before you sign
The six separate most sharply from London & Zurich on what each of them puts in writing where you can read it.
Terms as published. "Not published" means the fetched documents don't address the point: a fact about the website and not a claim about the contract.
How to choose
How we chose these providers
You'll find the six in alphabetical order, because no independent UK ranking of direct debit providers exists and every "best" page ranking today is published by one of the vendors. Each price and term comes from the provider's own page or published contract, and the pages we could link are listed in the sources below so you can check them. Where a provider publishes no price or term, you'll see it recorded as not published instead of estimated, and the same goes for any capability missing from their site.
Review scores are third-party, carry their platform and the count, and are labelled user-reported. Where two platforms disagree materially, as they do for GoCardless, you get both; where none could be retrieved with a count, you get none.
Want to see what your own book costs on a capped rate? Book a demo or read the pricing.
Common questions
No customer terms or service agreement could be found. The /terms-and-conditions/ URL returns a 404 and the privacy policy is blocked by robots.txt, so the minimum term, notice period, exit fee and data-export position are all unavailable to read before you sign. That's a statement about their website and says nothing about what their contract contains.
No cap is published on any tier. Foundation is "Pricing around 1%" and Business "from 0.5% or 20p", with nothing stated about a ceiling. On a £3,000 collection, around 1% uncapped is roughly £30 where GoCardless Standard and Adfin both charge £4, which is our arithmetic on their published wording.
Not with most of these. Access PaySuite and Bottomline both collect without you holding a SUN, and so does GoCardless, while London & Zurich will obtain one for you through its sponsor bank. Modulr's pages are framed around your own SUN with no shared option published, so budget for bank sponsorship there.
Not under the Bacs Direct Debit Bulk Change Process, where existing instructions transfer and your payers sign nothing again. Where mandates are re-created instead, each customer signs a new one. Your incoming provider decides which route you get, because no scheme document publishes a minimum mandate count.
It depends who you move to, and this is a point in London & Zurich's favour. They send the Bacs Notification of Change themselves. Stripe makes the merchant send it and GoCardless gives you a template, so ask any provider you're considering to put in writing who drafts it and who sends it.
Every figure came from the provider's own page, and every contract term from their own published documents. No provider in this roster publishes an effective date on its pricing page, so re-check your rate and your notice period before you commit to either.
Sources
Adfin is one of the providers compared here and publishes this article, so weigh our entry accordingly. Competitor pricing and contract terms are each provider's own published documents; providers change prices, so check before you commit. Review scores are third-party and user-reported. "Not published" throughout means the documents we read don't address the point; a provider may well have the capability or the term. Last updated August 2026.
