I didn’t know what PSP stood for until this weekend.
I was scanning KDP news for this newsletter – the usual sweep of community forums, policy updates, the kind of reading that makes you feel like a tax accountant who accidentally ended up in publishing – and I kept seeing the same three letters. PSP. PSP deadline. PSP program. August 1.
I use Revolut. I publish from Poland. My first thought was: should I be worried?
I spent an hour digging. Revolut Bank UAB holds a full EU banking license from Lithuania, issued December 2021. In Amazon’s taxonomy, that makes it a deposit-taking bank. Not a PSP. I’m fine.
Then I thought about a subscriber of mine in Manila.
And an author I’d never met in a KDP Community thread, posting from Morocco: “The requirements for wire transfers are unrealistic and inappropriate for individual authors and small publishers.”
And another, in a different thread, who’d used the same bank account to receive royalties for ten years. Flagged out of nowhere: “My bank says they have no idea what this is about.”
Those authors have eleven days.
What a PSP is (and isn’t)
A Payment Service Provider is a company that isn’t a bank but gives you bank-like account details to receive international payments. Payoneer is one. PingPong. LianLian Global. Dozens of others, mostly serving authors outside the US and EU who don’t have access to the traditional banking infrastructure that Amazon’s systems were built around.
Amazon used to accept all of them. Now it doesn’t.
Starting August 1, 2026, KDP will only send royalties to two types of accounts: a deposit-taking bank (your local Chase, Barclays, PKO, or a licensed fintech like Revolut), or a PSP that has enrolled in Amazon’s Payment Service Provider Program and completed their KYC verification.
The participating list has about 30 companies on it. You can check it here.
If your payment provider isn’t on it and isn’t a licensed bank, your account goes on hold. Not just your payments. Your ability to publish. You can’t push new titles. You can’t update existing ones. Everything freezes until you switch to an eligible account.
Amazon started sending warning emails on June 15. If you received one and haven’t acted, the clock is running.
Who this hits
Not me. Not most of my American or European readers. If you have a checking account at a traditional bank, you will not notice this deadline pass.
It hits authors in countries where traditional banking infrastructure is thin and PSPs are the primary way to receive international payments. The Philippines. Morocco. Uganda. Bangladesh. Parts of South America. Countries where opening a USD-receiving bank account means navigating bureaucracy that was never designed for a solo author earning $400 a month in ebook royalties.
These are also the countries where self-publishing on KDP represents one of the most accessible paths to earning in dollars. The platform that removed geographic barriers to publishing is now enforcing geographic barriers to getting paid.
The PSP program exists for real reasons. KYC compliance. Sanctions screening. Anti-money-laundering. Fraud prevention. Amazon isn’t doing this to hurt authors. They’re doing it because financial regulators require it and because some PSPs weren’t meeting their obligations.
But intent and experience are different things. And the experience, for an author in the wrong country, is that a platform they’ve published on for years just told them to fix their banking in six weeks or lose access.
The confusion makes it worse
The deadline would be manageable if the system worked. It doesn’t.
KDP Community threads from the past two weeks show authors whose PSPs are on the participating list still receiving warning emails. One author’s bank has been flagged despite being a deposit-taking institution she’s used for a decade. Amazon’s support responses are generic – copy-pasted links to the same FAQ page the author already read before she contacted them.
Payoneer is on the participating list. It was also pulled for new accounts without any announcement. An author in Morocco discovered this after weeks of trying to set up a payment method, contacting both Payoneer and Amazon, getting contradictory answers from each.
If you get the warning email, you don’t know whether your PSP failed to enroll, failed Amazon’s KYC check, or whether the system just misfired. The penalty for guessing wrong is the same in all three cases.
What to do this week
Log into KDP. Go to Account Settings. Look for a yellow or red banner about your payment method.
If there’s no banner, you’re clear. Amazon has already classified your account as eligible. Move on with your week.
If there IS a banner, check the participating PSP list. If your provider is on it, contact KDP support and reference the list – your PSP may still be completing its KYC verification, which is their problem to solve, not yours, but you need to push them.
If your provider is NOT on the list, you have two options before August 1. Switch to a participating PSP – Payoneer is the most widely available one still enrolled. Or open an account at a deposit-taking bank that accepts international transfers.
In some countries, neither of those is simple. If you can’t get there in eleven days, contact KDP support now to document your situation. Pull any pending title updates or new submissions through before the freeze hits. And start the process of opening an eligible account so the hold is as short as it can be.
Full FAQ from Amazon here.
Amazon built the largest self-publishing platform on earth. It removed the gatekeepers for who could write and sell a book. Then it built a payment system that works best in the countries that needed that access least.
I don’t think it’s malicious. I think it’s unfinished.
For eleven days, the distance between those two words is someone else’s publishing career.
Big corporations doing weird things that make sense only to them and hurt their clientele .... check! I swear every big company disappoints.
Just a tip, from someone who’s had a PSP account t for years: Wise is quite excellent. Every one of my tips, products, subscriptions, etc is through Stripe, but it’s not approved by Amazon because it doesn’t give users an account number and routing number.