To gain insight into the non-abelian Born–Infeld (NBI) action, we study coinciding D-branes wrapped on tori, and turn on magnetic fields on their worldvolume. We then compare predictions for the spectrum of open strings stretching between these D-branes, from perturbative string theory and from the effective NBI action. Under some plausible assumptions, we find corrections to the Str-prescription for the NBI action at order F 6 . In the process we give a way to classify terms in the NBI action that can be written in terms of field strengths only, in terms of permutation group theory.