Open banking adoption is accelerating. In the UK alone, over 33 million successful payments are made monthly, and adoption is accelerating across Europe. For enterprise payment providers (PSPs), open banking now underpins critical services: Pay by Bank at the checkout, supporting merchant onboarding processes, enabling faster credit decisioning workflows, and soon recurring payments via cVRP will be added to that list.
But there's a structural risk many PSPs haven't addressed.
In the card payments world, PSPs manage multiple acquirers and gateways as standard practice; routing traffic for resilience, optimising for conversion, and negotiating competitive rates. Yet when it comes to open banking, where fragmentation is more pronounced, many still rely on a single vendor. This creates a fragile foundation for a service layer that's increasingly becoming business-critical.
Enterprise PSPs that build an orchestration layer across multiple open banking providers can deliver better coverage, higher reliability, and superior service quality with greater flexibility. This gives them a structural advantage over competitors locked into a single vendor's coverage, product roadmap, and pricing.
How single-provider dependency creates strategic risk
No single open banking provider covers every bank, in every market, equally well. The global landscape is fragmented by design with different regulatory frameworks, varying bank API quality, and uneven provider strengths across regions and capabilities. For enterprise PSPs operating across multiple geographies, this creates 3 main structural risks:
Coverage gaps limit your addressable market: As open banking connections need to be built with individual banks, open banking providers tend to build them out region by region. So while a provider might offer strong coverage in the UK, they may offer patchier coverage in Germany. If your merchants operate across borders, a single provider's coverage gaps become your own, restricting the services you can offer and the markets you can serve.
A single point of failure puts your merchants at risk: If your sole open banking provider experiences downtime, every service built on that infrastructure goes down with it. For merchants that measure transaction volumes per second or minute, even brief service interruptions during peak trading periods can cost significant revenue.
You lose control of your own roadmap. When you depend on a single provider, you inherit their priorities. Their bank connectivity rollout becomes your expansion timeline. Their pricing becomes your cost base. Their product decisions shape your service capabilities. This means you lose the negotiating position and the flexibility to respond to merchant demand on your own terms.
PSPs already solve these issues for cards. Now it’s time to take the same approach for open banking.
The four pillars of multi-vendor open banking orchestration
Building an orchestration layer that connects multiple open banking providers through a unified gateway gives you control that a single-provider model can’t deliver.
1. Capabilities compound to deliver better outcomes
Different open banking providers have different strengths, and those strengths often diverge between payments and data. One provider may deliver superior payment services (PIS) with high conversion rates and fast settlement, while another offers best-in-class data (AIS) with richer transaction data.
Leading enterprise PSPs are already adopting this approach: using one provider for payment initiation where it delivers the highest conversion rates, and a different provider for data services where it offers the most complete and usable account information access. They've recognised that optimising for each capability independently delivers better outcomes than accepting a compromise across both from a single vendor.
An orchestration layer lets you do the same: route each capability to the provider that delivers the strongest performance, rather than settling for a single provider's average across the board.
Beyond PIS and AIS, this approach also gives you the ability to orchestrate for specialist capabilities. Business account coverage, for example, is critical for merchant onboarding and credit decisioning, but it varies substantially between providers. Automatically routing customers who have data or payment needs for B2B use cases to the most suitable provider gives your service depth and breadth to serve a wider range of customer types.
2. Scaling across geographies becomes more feasible
As open banking regulation and bank API quality differ significantly by market, connecting multiple providers through your gateway offers merchants consistent open banking services regardless of which market they operate in. You can extend into new regions without rebuilding your stack, simply by plugging in an additional provider with strong local coverage at the gateway level. This turns geographic expansion from a major infrastructure project into a configuration change.
3. Resilience gets a critical boost when it matters
If Provider A goes down or experiences degraded performance with a specific bank group, your gateway can automatically redirect traffic to Provider B. Your merchants' payment flows and data services stay online, even during provider outages.
This principle is well-established in payment processing. Enterprise PSPs already implement failover for card transactions to protect against acquirer downtime. As open banking becomes increasingly mission-critical, powering checkout, subscriptions, onboarding, and value-added services, the same resilience standards should apply.
For PSPs powering high-volume e-commerce and subscription merchants, particularly as cVRP brings recurring open banking payments into the mainstream, this built-in redundancy will become a commercial requirement.
4. Conversion optimisation is driven by competition
When you route traffic through multiple providers, you generate comparative performance data: conversion rates, error rates, latency, and success rates across specific bank groups. This gives you the intelligence to optimise routing in real time, always directing traffic to the provider delivering the best results for a given transaction type, region, or bank.
It also creates a healthy competitive dynamic. Your providers know they need to maintain high-quality service to retain their share of your volume. This shifts the power balance, so rather than being locked into one vendor's performance, you can continuously benchmark and optimise based on real data.
Over time, even small improvements in conversion rates compound into meaningful revenue gains. For a high-volume PSP, a 0.5-1 percentage point improvement in open banking payment success rates can translate into substantial additional revenue, both for you and your merchants.
How to structure your orchestration layer
While a complete transaction flow spans from raw bank connectivity to the final merchant use cases, your orchestration strategy should focus on three central layers firmly within your control: Open banking infrastructure, the unified gateway, and modular service kits. By architecting these three distinct layers effectively, you can create a turn fragmented external vendor inputs into unified, high-performing services for your merchants that you control.
The open banking infrastructure layer
This is your foundation layer which is where Yapily provides the necessary infrastructure. Regulated open banking platforms connect to bank APIs across markets. Your strategy here should be about selecting complementary providers that together cover the broadest possible set of banks, geographies, and capabilities.
Choosing a provider that excels at payment initiation alone may not deliver equally strong data coverage, and vice versa. By mapping your providers against the specific markets and bank groups your merchants need, and identifying where gaps exist that a second or third provider could fill, you ensure resilience.Your gateway should tap into at least two high-performing providers per core market. If a primary provider drops service in one region, your gateway can automatically fall back to a secondary partner, keeping your merchants' services online.
The unified orchestration layer
This is where you would build the orchestration layer that links providers and your merchant-facing services. It serves three critical functions:
It normalises fragmented data from different providers into a single, standardised format. This means your product teams build against one consistent API, regardless of which provider is handling the request on the backend.
It implements routing logic, directing traffic to the provider offering the best conversion rates, the lowest costs, or the most reliable connectivity for a given transaction type and region.
It handles failover automatically. If one provider experiences issues, the orchestration layer redirects traffic without any merchant-facing disruption. This is the layer that absorbs the complexity of managing multiple vendors, so your internal teams don't have to.
The modular service kit layer
The orchestration layer feeds directly into modular service "kits" tailored to specific merchant use cases or needs. These kits might include Pay by Bank for e-commerce checkout, recurring payments via cVRP for subscription merchants, onboarding automation for marketplaces, or credit decisioning for lending platforms.
Because these services connect to a standardised gateway, adding a new provider or expanding into a new market doesn't require rebuilding each service from scratch. You plug in a new regional provider at the gateway level which connects them to the orchestration layer, and your entire suite of merchant-facing services becomes available in that new territory. This is how you scale efficiently: by decoupling your merchant services from the underlying provider infrastructure.
For a deeper look at how these modular services can create compounding value for your merchants, explore our guide to building a strategic growth engine with open banking.
Why 2026 is the right time to build
Several emerging milestones make 2026 the year to build a multi-vendor strategy.
Instant refunds are the norm: Remember that deep sigh you have when a retailer says “refunds take upto 28 days to credit your account”? Open banking enables instant refunds that can be set up to automatically trigger as soon as the stock is returned and approved. This is not the standard experience shoppers expect.
cVRP is going live: The first commercial Variable Recurring Payments are ready to go live (expected in May 2026), with wider e-commerce use cases expected by year-end. PSPs launching cVRP need infrastructure that can handle the reliability demands of recurring payments. A multi-vendor approach gives you the failover and conversion optimisation that subscription merchants will expect.
Read more about recurring open banking payments.
Agentic commerce is accelerating: AI agents will need real-time data access to operate on behalf of consumers. McKinsey projects that agentic commerce could move $3 to $5 trillion of global retail revenue by 2030. PSPs serving agent-initiated transactions across multiple merchants and geographies will require the provider diversity and failover capacity that a single-vendor model cannot deliver.
Read more about how to prepare for agentic commerce here.
Open Finance is on the horizon: As regulation extends data-sharing beyond current accounts and into pensions, insurance, and investments, PSPs with flexible, multi-provider architectures will be able to expand into new data categories without major rebuilds. The orchestration model you build now will become a foundation for you to launch Open Finance-driven services in the future.
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Where Yapily fits in your open banking orchestration strategy
Building an orchestration layer requires a reliable primary anchor. A multi-vendor approach doesn't mean starting from scratch; it means building around a core provider that delivers maximum depth across both payments and data.
Yapily offers both AIS and PIS through a single API, giving you the flexibility to start building your multi vendor open banking strategy, whether that's data for merchant onboarding or payments for Pay by Bank. With coverage across 2,000+ banks in 19 countries, including strong B2B and B2C connectivity across the UK and Europe, Yapily provides the breadth that enterprise PSPs need as a core anchor within a multi-vendor strategy.
As a founding member of the VRP Working Group and a participant in Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) initiative, Yapily is positioned at the forefront of both cVRP and agentic commerce readiness. Over the past 12 months, we've processed 47.2 million payments and handled 721 million API calls, giving you the reliability and scale that a multi-vendor architecture demands.
White-label and hosted options mean you retain full control of the merchant relationship while our infrastructure handles the connectivity complexity behind the scenes.
Ready to find out how Yapily fits into your multi-vendor open banking strategy? Book a meeting with one of our open banking experts.