Choosing the right open banking provider can be challenging. It’s an important decision—one that can directly impact the speed of your innovation, the quality of your customer experience, and your long-term scalability.
But you might be questioning how open banking providers actually differ, and how you can find the best one for your needs.
At Yapily, we’ve helped hundreds of fintechs, financial services, lenders, and enterprises integrate open banking successfully. We understand the common roadblocks: fragmented bank coverage, unclear licensing models, clunky integrations, and support that disappears when you need it most.
This guide is designed to empower you to cut through the noise and focus on what really matters.
Whether you’re evaluating providers for the first time or reconsidering your current partner, we’ll walk you through the key criteria to consider and 50 essential questions to ask a potential open banking provider.
You’ll learn how to assess open banking providers across key areas:
- Bank coverage
- Product functionality
- Licensing and user experience
- Integration
- Ongoing support
- Security
- Company strength and stability
Looking for an open banking solution with both payment and data services? Yapily might be for you. Book a call with our experts to find out how we can help
1) Bank coverage
Bank coverage isn’t just a numbers game. It’s about meaningful access: the number of banks and financial institutions a provider connects with, the types of accounts supported (consumer and business), and how consistently connections perform in real-world scenarios.
The challenge? Every provider defines “coverage” differently. That makes it hard to compare apples with apples, especially when you’re trying to balance reach, conversion, and compliance.
A provider should clearly communicate the percentage of banks and bank accounts they cover in each market, and how that coverage translates into real-world performance like conversion rates.
It’s also critical to determine whether a provider’s APIs are fully PSD2-compliant. Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), a core requirement of PSD2, ensures sensitive data is shared securely. In contrast, unregulated methods like screen scraping increase the risk of security vulnerabilities and can damage customer trust.
Who should care, and why?
- Chief product officers: Need to ensure coverage today aligns with product roadmap tomorrow, especially across multiple markets.
- Strategy and expansion teams: Rely on strong geographic coverage to enable scalable growth across new regions.
- Compliance teams: Want to avoid risk by working only with providers offering secure, regulated access.
Key questions to ask
| Question | Why it matters | Yapily’s approach |
|---|---|---|
| What percentage of banks do you cover in key markets? | Indicates reach and ability to serve users across regions. | Over 90% of bank accounts in Europe, including 99% coverage in the UK and 95% in Germany. Note: these are estimations, and the exact coverage may differ slightly. |
| What percentage of the banked population do you reach? | A better reflection of real-world coverage than raw bank counts. | Broad access to both consumer and business accounts in every supported market. |
| Do you support both consumer and business accounts? | Essential for products that serve SMEs, sole traders, or business users. | Yes, consistently across all regions. |
| What are your conversion rates per country? | Highlights connection quality and user experience. | High conversion rates driven by stable, direct API integrations tested with real accounts. |
| Is your coverage fully regulated, or does it include unregulated methods? | Unregulated methods (e.g. screen scraping) increase risk and reduce reliability. | 100% API-based and PSD2-compliant—no screen scraping. |
| Are connections maintained in-house or by third parties? | Impacts control, reliability, and response time to issues. | All bank integrations are built and maintained in-house by Yapily. |
| How often are connections tested? | Regular testing improves stability and reduces failure points. | All connections are tested regularly using live bank accounts (both consumer and business accounts). |
| What markets do you plan to expand to next? | Helps ensure long-term alignment with your growth strategy. | Actively expanding across Europe, based on customer demand and market readiness. |
2) Product features: data depth and payment flexibility
Data product features
Before diving into specific functionality, first consider the account types you need access to: consumer, business, or corporate. This determines the scope of both your data needs and payment capabilities. If a provider doesn’t offer business account connectivity and this is crucial for your business, then clearly, they’re not the right fit for you.
You then need to consider whether you need raw data, enriched data, or both.
- Raw data gives you uncategorised data directly from the bank. It’s ideal for use cases like identity checks, affordability assessments, income verification, and account ownership validation.
- Enriched data builds on this by cleaning, categorising, and interpreting raw inputs. It’s often used for creditworthiness analysis, budgeting tools, account aggregation, and smarter onboarding.
Payment product features
Not all providers offer the same range or quality of open banking payments. When comparing, it’s essential to assess whether the provider supports the types of payments your product needs:
- Single payments, for one-off transfers like top-ups, refunds, or P2P payments.
- Bulk payments, to streamline high-volume payouts such as payroll or supplier payments.
- Variable recurring payments (VRPs), a newer model offering dynamic recurring transactions with more flexibility than Direct Debit.
Each comes with its own strengths, and depending on your market, availability may vary, so it’s essential to confirm coverage by region.
Who should care, and why?
- Chief product officers: Need to ensure the provider’s features support current and future product goals.
- Product owners: Will assess whether the functionality matches specific use cases and regions.
- Engineering teams: Need clarity on data structure, API capabilities, and integration complexity.
Key questions to ask: Data functionality
| Question | Why it matters | Yapily’s approach |
|---|---|---|
| What account types do you support (consumer, business, corporate)? | Not all providers support business or corporate accounts, which limits use cases. | Yapily supports consumer, business, and corporate accounts across all markets. |
| Do you provide raw and enriched data? | Some use cases require raw accuracy, others need actionable insights. | Yapily provides both raw and enriched data through Yapily Data and Yapily Validate (using Yapily Data Plus). Yes, Yapily offers transaction enrichment through Data Plus. Learn more here |
| How far back does transaction data history go? | Essential for underwriting, KYC, affordability checks, and behavioural insights. | Up to 2 years, depending on the bank. |
| Is the data normalised across banks? | Reduces engineering complexity and speeds up time to market. | Yes, a standardised schema is used across all integrations. |
| Do you support income verification or other insights? | Prebuilt insights accelerate development and reduce internal data science effort. | Yes, including income verification, balance prediction, affordability, and more. |
Key questions to ask: Payment functionality
| Question | Why it matters | Yapily’s approach |
|---|---|---|
| Which countries support each payment type? | Coverage varies by market. | Yapily supports Single, Bulk, and VRPs across Europe. |
| What payment rails do you use? | Impacts cost, speed, and reliability. | Local bank rails via PSD2 APIs for real-time or same-day settlement. |
| How are funds settled, and how fast? | Affects reconciliation and UX. | Typically instant or same-day, depending on the bank. |
| Do you support refunds? | Required for full payment lifecycle. | Yes, refundable via the Yapily Payments API. |
| Can we combine data and payments in one flow? | Creates better UX and operational efficiency. | Yes, used by clients for use cases like payroll, onboarding, and conditional payouts. |
| Do you support VRPs? What use cases are live? | Enables more flexible recurring billing. | Yes, VRP support in the UK for both sweeping and commercial use cases. |
What makes Yapily different?
Yapily offers a modular open banking platform with full support for both data and payments, giving you flexibility, scalability, and full control over user experience.
- Data products like Yapily Data Plus and Yapily Validate offer access to both raw and enriched information, enabling advanced use cases out of the box.
- Payments are covered via Single, Bulk, and Variable Recurring Payment flows, with infrastructure that plugs directly into local bank rails.
- Add-ons like Yapily Connect and Virtual Accounts allow you to design seamless, end-to-end user journeys, from verification to payment to reconciliation.
Yapily customers use these tools to power everything from automated payroll to real-time risk checks, all while maintaining full control over their UI and user flow.
3) Licensing and UX: balancing speed to market and user control
To access open banking data or initiate payments on a customer’s behalf, you’ll need one or both of the following licences:
- Account Information Service Provider (AISP) – to access financial data with user consent
- Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP) – to initiate payments on behalf of users
Securing these licences directly can take up to 9 months and involves a heavy operational lift. For many companies—especially those launching or scaling quickly—it’s faster and more practical to use a provider’s existing licence instead.
Equally important is how much control you have over the user experience. Some providers lock you into their front-end UI. Others offer a white-label infrastructure, allowing you to fully brand the flow and integrate it directly into your product.
Who should care, and why?
- Chief operating officers: Need to weigh time-to-market against the operational demands of licensing and compliance.
- Chief product officers and UX Leads: Want full control over branding, onboarding, and flow optimisation.
- Legal and compliance teams: Responsible for ensuring the chosen licensing model meets regulatory requirements in target markets.
Key questions to ask about licensing and UX
| Question | Why it matters | Yapily’s approach |
|---|---|---|
| Do you offer open banking licences? | Can speed up go-to-market by bypassing the licensing process. | Yes. Yapily offers both AISP and PISP licences through Yapily Connect. |
| Which licences do you support? | Determines the scope of data and payment services you can access. | Both AISP and PISP, covering all regulated use cases. |
| Does your licence come at an extra cost? | Licensing fees can add up fast, especially at scale. | No additional cost to use Yapily’s regulated access. |
| Can we use our own licences? | Some companies prefer to operate under their own licence as they grow. | Yes. You can start with Yapily’s licence and switch to your own later. |
| Can your solution be white-labelled? | Impacts control over the user experience. | Yes. Yapily is fully white-label. We also offer Hosted Solutions so you can get to market quickly while we build your white-label solution. |
| What are the branding opportunities inside user flows? | Affects customer trust and consistency across your product. | Full control over UX design, branding, and copy. Yapily stays behind the scenes. |
4) Integration process: from technical setup to live environment
A smooth integration can make or break the onboarding experience. While open banking infrastructure can be complex, a good provider should deliver clear documentation, hands-on support, and a realistic timeline to get you live.
Start by reviewing the API documentation. It should be thorough, well-maintained, and developer-friendly. Beyond the docs, look for providers who offer structured onboarding plans with clear milestones, roles, and timelines. Bonus points if they test connections using live bank accounts—not just mock environments.
Who should care, and why?
- Chief technology officers: Need confidence that the provider’s infrastructure will integrate cleanly into existing architecture.
- DevOps and engineering teams: Will evaluate API quality, test environments, and available tooling.
- Implementation managers: Responsible for coordinating timelines, resources, and delivery milestones across teams.
Key questions to ask about integration
| Question | Why it matters | Yapily’s approach |
|---|---|---|
| Can we test your technology before committing? | Helps validate technical fit before making a decision. | Yes. You can explore our sandbox environment, API docs, and even simulate flows pre-integration. |
| What tooling do you provide for developers? | Good tooling reduces time-to-market and developer workload. | Yapily Docs, Yapily Console, and full OpenAPI Specification (OAS) for rapid client library generation. |
| Do you provide sandboxes and a testing environment? | Essential for testing integration flows before going live. | Yes. Full-featured sandbox and staging environments available. |
| Do you test using live bank accounts? | Indicates real-world reliability—not just mock data. | Yes. Every integration is tested using live bank accounts before rollout. |
| How long do you estimate implementation will take? | Sets expectations across teams and aligns resources. | Customers typically get up and running within hours to a few days. |
| What are your implementation milestones? | Helps project managers track progress and dependencies. | Yapily provides a full onboarding plan with step-by-step milestones and support. |
| How will you support our team during implementation? | Support can make or break go-live. | A dedicated onboarding team supports you from day one, with direct engineering contact if needed. |
What makes Yapily different?
Yapily doesn’t just hand you an API key and leave you to figure it out. Our dedicated onboarding team ensures new customers are fully supported, from first call to first transaction.
We provide:
- Yapily Docs: Clear, up-to-date technical documentation for all endpoints and use cases
- Yapily Console: A single interface for managing your integration, apps, and credentials
- OpenAPI Specification (OAS): To generate client-side libraries in any language you need
Plus, every integration is tested with real bank accounts, not just mocks—so you can go live with confidence.
Want to see how it works? Yapily allows your developers to try our sandbox test environment, with no commitment. Try it here.
5) Support (beyond go-live)
Strong technical support is critical to ensuring uptime, resolving issues quickly, and unlocking long-term value from your open banking provider.
While most providers offer some level of customer service, the best ones provide dedicated customer success managers, access to support engineers, and deep knowledge of both the product and the banks it connects to. Regional and vertical expertise can make a significant difference when handling nuanced technical or compliance issues.
Who should care, and why?
- Chief technology officers: Need to ensure their teams can get timely help when something goes wrong.
- Support and operations teams: Will engage most with support channels, so they need to understand service levels, escalation paths, and incident response times.
- Customer experience leads: Rely on responsive providers to maintain a smooth end-user journey during outages or open banking API changes.
Key questions to ask about support
| Question | Why it matters | Yapily’s approach |
|---|---|---|
| Can you provide an overview of your customer service plans? | Helps teams understand the level of support available at different stages. | Yapily offers proactive, tiered support with options tailored to customer size and complexity. |
| Do you have a technical service ticketing system? | Critical for tracking issues, prioritising fixes, and ensuring transparency. | Yes. All customers get access to a structured ticketing system for technical issues. |
| Would we have a dedicated Customer Success Manager? | A single point of contact makes communication faster and more effective. | Yes. Every customer is assigned a dedicated CSM to guide implementation and day-to-day operations. |
| What is your incident response process? | Clear incident management reduces downtime and impact. | Incidents are triaged immediately via our support platform, with escalation protocols and regular status updates. |
| Have you met your SLAs over the last 12 months? | Past performance is the best predictor of future reliability. | Yapily has consistently met or exceeded SLAs, maintaining 99.95% uptime. |
What makes Yapily different?
At Yapily, support isn’t an afterthought—it’s built into the product experience. Our white glove support model includes support from our Customer Success Managers from day one, and a structured ticketing system for technical and operational queries.
We can provide tiered support options based on your business needs.
Find out more by talking to one of our experts
6) Security: protecting your data, reputation, and users
Security is a non-negotiable when it comes to open banking. You’re dealing with sensitive financial data, user consent, and regulatory scrutiny. Any lapse could damage user trust, trigger fines, or compromise your entire platform.
A credible provider should be transparent about how they secure data in transit and at rest, how they handle token storage, where their infrastructure is hosted, and which certifications they hold. Bonus points if they’re proactive about real-time threat monitoring, not just reactive when something goes wrong.
Who should care, and why?
- Chief technology officers and CISOs: Set the security standards and policies for vendor partnerships.
- Legal and compliance teams: Need to ensure the provider meets industry regulations and data residency requirements.
- Product teams: Rely on secure flows to protect the integrity of the user experience.
Questions to ask about security – and how Yapily delivers
| Question | Why it matters | Yapily’s approach |
|---|---|---|
| What kind of data is processed, transferred, or stored? | You need to know exactly what’s handled—and how. | Only what’s required for regulated open banking use cases. Nothing more. |
| How is data protected in transit and at rest? | Encryption and secure transfer are foundational requirements. | All data is encrypted using industry standards (TLS 1.2+, AES-256). |
| How do you classify and store consent tokens? | Tokens are often a weak point if not handled properly. | Tokens are stored securely, access-controlled, and encrypted at rest. |
| Have you experienced any breaches in the last two years? | Transparency is key—and past issues are a sign to dig deeper. | No. Yapily has maintained a clean security record. |
| What happens to historical data when a user disconnects? | Important for compliance with data minimisation and GDPR. | All data is deleted or anonymised in line with regulatory requirements. |
| Do you resell or monetise customer data? | A critical trust issue—especially for regulated businesses. | No. Yapily does not resell or monetise data. Ever. |
| What certifications do you hold? | Proves a provider meets independently verified security standards. | ISO 27001 certified. Infrastructure is continuously monitored for threats. |
What makes Yapily different?
Security is foundational to everything we build. Yapily was born in the cloud, for the cloud, with real-time infrastructure monitoring, strict access controls, and full compliance with ISO 27001.
We don’t store more data than we need, we don’t monetise it, and we don’t rely on legacy systems. Instead, we design secure-by-default APIs and maintain 99.95% uptime—so you can build without worrying about what’s happening under the hood.
Yapily’s infrastructure is hosted in secure, compliant environments across Europe, and all activity is tracked, logged, and monitored in real time.
7) Company: stability, transparency, and long-term fit
Choosing a provider isn’t just about what they can do today—it’s about whether they’ll be around to support you tomorrow. You want a partner with a clear roadmap, transparent operating model, and the financial backing to grow with you.
Look beyond flashy features. Assess whether the provider is aligned with your business model, can scale with your roadmap, and offers pricing that reflects the value they deliver. Ask about funding, customer base, and product vision to gauge long-term viability.
Who should care, and why?
- Chief operating officers: Need to evaluate pricing models, cost scalability, and contract terms.
- Chief product officers: Want insight into the provider’s roadmap and product development priorities.
- Procurement and finance teams: Focus on financial stability, commercial models, and risk.
Key questions to ask about the company
| Question | Why it matters | Yapily’s approach |
|---|---|---|
| What’s your pricing model? | Helps assess long-term cost alignment with value delivered. | Flexible, volume-based pricing aligned to usage and growth. No hidden fees. |
| How long have you been in business? | Indicates market experience and reliability. | Founded in 2017, with years of open banking expertise across Europe. |
| Can you share customer case studies? | Demonstrates proven impact in real-world use cases. | Yes. Case studies across fintech, lending, accounting, and more: |
| How is your business funded? | Signals financial health and future-proofing. | Backed by top-tier investors with strong long-term backing. |
| Can you share your product roadmap? | Shows how the provider is evolving and aligning with industry trends. | Yapily shares roadmap highlights and works closely with customers on feature development. |
What makes Yapily different?
Yapily is a pure open banking infrastructure provider, not a data broker or consumer app. That means we’re entirely focused on building the best developer-first platform for financial innovation—without conflicts of interest or data monetisation models.
We’ve raised over $70 million in funding, are trusted by some of Europe’s most innovative fintechs, and continue to scale with a focus on quality, performance, and transparency.
From our commercial model to our product roadmap, everything we do is designed to help our customers succeed—now and in the years to come.
Choose Yapily as your open banking provider
As one of Europe’s leading open banking providers, Yapily ticks all the boxes for regulated bank coverage, robust product functionality, seamless integration, a dedicated support team, and strong security measures.
Focused entirely on building high-quality infrastructure, we enable our customers’ products to take centre stage. Here’s what some of them have said about us:
“With Yapily and open banking, we are helping our customers to take back control of their finances. We are particularly excited because the partnership will allow us to continue evolving as we look to embed more of Yapily’s open banking solutions into our offering.” - Carlo Gualandri, Founder and CEO, Soldo
“It’s fair to say that Yapily is an integral part of Comma - the value that Yapily adds by delivering API standardisation and bank integrations really helps us focus on our mission to make payments better for SMEs.” - Ger Kelly, Head of Banking, Comma
“Selecting Yapily as Juni’s open banking partner of choice was a no-brainer; the depth, scalability, and reliability of its coverage enables us to meet the needs of our customers, now and in the future.” Samir El-Sabini, Co-founder and CEO of Juni
“Emma helps its users achieve financial wellbeing by providing them with a complete overview of their spending, including reporting, insights, and predictions for the future. Open banking makes this possible…and Yapily makes it a quick and easy process” - Edoardo Moreni, Co-Founder and CEO, Emma
*“We have seen great adoption of open banking amongst our customers. €7.3m across UK, Netherlands and France have been topped up by our customers using Yapily’s open banking infrastructure.” *Clara Schindler Product Manager/Payments at Pleo
Try our demo today to see what we can build together, or book a call with one of our experts.
