What are payment references?
When you make a payment from your account to someone or to a company, you can add a payment reference. This helps the recipient understand what the payment is for. For example, ‘Rent’, ‘Loan repayment’, or ‘Birthday gift’.
In the case of economic abuse, payment references can be used to send harmful messages to the recipient. For example, an ex-partner who has been blocked from contacting you may use payment references on payments they make from their account to send insults or threats.
If someone is using payment references to abuse you
If someone is sending you money from their account and using payment references to send abusive, threatening or distressing messages, you can choose to hide all the payment references coming from their account.
How to hide and unhide payment references
In our app
- Log in to our app.
- Go to your account where the payment references you don’t want to see are being received.
- Select any payment from the sender’s account where the payment references are coming from.
- Tap the eye icon to hide all payment references coming from that account.
If the sender is sending abusive payment references from more than one account, you will need to do the same for each of the sender’s accounts.
Payment references will be hidden for payments received on or after 18 March 2026. You will still see payment references for payments received before this date.
To unhide, and see the payment references that come from the sender's account, repeat these steps and tap the eye icon again.
How hidden payment references are managed in Open Banking
If you’ve chosen to hide or unhide payment references in our app, we will match this when we share data through Open Banking.
All other transaction data that’s not been hidden will continue to be shown in Open Banking as normal.
To try to make sure third parties don’t show you payment references you’ve asked to hide, we ask them to refresh their data each time you use their app. If they use data they have saved, this may not match your latest preference.