How does a PSE payment work?
At checkout the shopper chooses PSE, selects whether they are a person or a company, and picks their bank from the list of participating institutions. The provider registers the transaction with ACH Colombia, and PSE redirects the shopper to their bank’s online banking. The shopper logs in, reviews the amount and merchant, and approves the debit. The bank confirms the result to PSE, which sends the shopper back to the merchant and reports an approved, rejected or pending status to the provider. Funds then move to the merchant through the ACH network. Once approved, the instruction cannot be modified or cancelled except through the formal reversal procedure. Companies can pay through PSE from business accounts too, which makes it common for B2B invoices, while individuals use it for one-off purchases and recurring bills.
Why does PSE matter for merchants?
PSE has run since 2005 and is the default online payment method for Colombians who pay from their bank account rather than a credit card. ACH Colombia reported more than 370 million PSE transactions in the first half of 2024. In 2026 the figures are higher again: 236 million transactions in the first quarter, up 12% on a year earlier according to La Nota Económica, and more than 487 million in the first half according to La República. ACH Colombia says purchases, loan repayments and wallet top-ups are the categories with the most transactions. It is used for everything from utility bills and taxes to e-commerce, airline tickets and education fees, so shoppers know the flow. For merchants it reaches the banked population without card fraud risk. For an online store selling into Colombia, PSE sits next to debit and credit cards and Nequi as one of the methods shoppers expect to see at checkout, and it serves customers who do not hold a card or prefer not to use one online.
A new instant rail now sits beside it. Bre-B, the Banco de la República’s instant payment system, began operating in the second half of 2025. By 5 April 2026 it had 34.6 million registered clients, more than 103.3 million keys and 638.6 million transactions, according to Portafolio. Bre-B is a push transfer between accounts, while PSE remains the redirect-and-approve debit that most online checkouts already support.
What can go wrong?
PSE failures happen mostly inside the bank. Shoppers forget online banking passwords, lack a registered token or hardware device, or hit the bank’s daily limit for online payments. Individual bank outages make PSE unavailable for that bank’s customers while others work normally. Some transactions return a pending status and resolve minutes or hours later, so the merchant must wait for the final result rather than treat pending as failed. A shopper who tries again after an outage can be debited twice. Consumers also have a legal right to request a payment reversal for fraud, unauthorised operations, non-delivery or defective products, which works much like a chargeback. A pending status that is never resolved also leaves orders in limbo, so merchants need a status query and a clear cut-off before they release or cancel an order.
How would Omno handle PSE?
A merchant would show PSE in the hosted checkout with the bank list from the provider, or take the redirect through Direct Links on its own checkout. Pending results would be tracked until the bank confirms, and the final status would reach the merchant by webhook, which is the source of truth for confirming the order. Routing rules set by the merchant would choose the provider. In the hosted checkout, if a provider is unavailable or rejects the request before the shopper is redirected, the payment moves to the next provider in the rule until one accepts. Customer groups and customer verification levels, passed from the merchant’s own verification provider, could limit PSE on high-value orders. The routing-decision log would record each step.