Explore how open banking APIs transform financial services by enabling seamless, secure access to banking data and payments. Learn how to choose the right API, discover key features like coverage, payment capabilities, and reliability, and see how Yapily’s API supports businesses like Juni and Kolleno.
If you are exploring open banking API providers, you are probably looking for a more reliable way to connect to bank accounts and move money without relying on fragile integrations or legacy file feeds.
In practice, teams want to use open banking APIs to:
Access real-time bank transaction data for onboarding, credit decisions, and cashflow analysis
Offer Pay by Bank and other account-to-account bank payments as a lower cost alternative to cards
Improve payment experiences at checkout while maintaining strong authentication and security
Open banking APIs sit at the core of the open banking framework. They allow authorised financial institutions to access account information and initiate payments securely, with explicit customer consent. The quality of that API shapes your coverage, the richness of data you can work with, and how smooth your payment experiences feel to end users.
This guide explains how open banking APIs work, what to look for when comparing providers, and how Yapily’s infrastructure helps businesses like Juni and Kolleno turn connectivity into real products and measurable results.
Want to chat with an open banking expert? Get in touch with us, or try our open banking sandbox for yourself
How do open banking APIs work?
An application programming interface (API) is a tool that allows a software or computer system to share data with another application. Across this interface, data is requested and provided in a way that’s intelligible, standardised, and secure.
It’s a useful tool because it allows an application to share only specific packets of data. This way, the rest of an organisation’s data can stay secure, while other applications can access the specific information they need. By contrast, card networks process payments using details like card numbers and expiration dates—though these are protected through encryption and other security measures.
Find out more about in our guide to open banking payments
In open banking, APIs are used to make financial data more accessible and to initiate payments. Under open banking regulations in the UK, every bank is required to provide an API that can be used by authorised third-party providers (TPPs). These APIs allow fintechs, financial institutions, lenders, credit agencies, and others to request consumer data—provided they are authorised and have the consumer’s explicit permission.
A solution like Yapily aggregates these individual bank APIs into a single integration. This not only simplifies access to financial data but also enables businesses to offer Pay by Bank functionality. With Yapily, you can combine account information service provider (AISP) capabilities for accessing data with payment initiation service provider (PISP) capabilities for initiating account-to-account payments—all through one API.
It’s important to note that open banking solutions differ in key aspects, including the number of banks they connect to, the scope of account data they can retrieve, the types of payments they support, and their overall performance as APIs.
In the next section, we’ll explore these differences to help you choose the right platform for your needs.
What to look for in an open banking API
Whether you’re intending to use open banking for payments, data, or both, the API you choose has a critical impact on the kinds of products you can offer—and where. So, before you choose to work with an open banking solution, consider these five factors:
1. Coverage.
One of the most important considerations is coverage. This refers to the number of banks and financial institutions that an API connects with in specific regions of the world. As such, it has a fundamental impact on the viability of your products in particular geographies.
Think back to the fintech above. If its app was designed to aggregate consumers’ different bank accounts, but it was missing connections with many key banks, people would simply not be likely to use it.
So, choose an API that has high coverage in the markets you want to enter. A percentage higher than 85% is usually enough, but the higher the better.
2. Account connections.
API specifications may say that it has 99% coverage in a particular region. However, that’s of limited use if they can only connect with certain kinds of banking services, such as consumer or wealth accounts. If you want to serve customers using business bank accounts, for instance, this won’t be enough.
Of course, the kinds of account connections you need will depend on the kinds of customers you serve and use cases you want to solve for. But if your API can’t connect with a particular account, it will limit the kinds of products you can offer in future.
3. The depth of banking data or range of payment features.
Related to the previous point is the variety of features that the API supports, in terms of payments and data.
For instance, in the case of payments, different API platforms support different features, such as variable recurring payments (sweeping and commercial) or bulk payments. Or, if you’re looking for data services, you’ll likely be interested in the quality of data enrichment, including how many fields a platform enriches your data with.
Again, the specific features you want will depend on your offering. For example, lenders might only need open banking for affordability assessments or to streamline loan repayments.
On the other hand, a PSP working with subscription-based businesses could soon benefit from emerging solutions like commercial VRP, which has the potential to automate regular payments without manual effort.
By tailoring open banking options to suit each client’s unique needs, you can help them avoid unnecessary costs and complexities while preparing for future innovations like cVRP.
4. Robustness of the technology.
If you’re a payment services provider (PSP), for example, you may be interested in the appropriateness of your platform for enterprises, or the overall strength of their service. If you're a large PSP or financial institution, it’s really important that the API can support your volume of requests—otherwise the customer experience will suffer too.
5. The user experience.
A final important factor to consider is how the API’s service appears to the end user of the application, as this can affect how likely they are to actually use it. For instance, will the API’s brand logo appear to the user? Or does the API offer a white label service, so that it looks like a native part of your product?
Some APIs only offer hosted pages, which are web pages hosted by the API provider where users complete the payment. These pages display the provider’s branding, rather than your own. This setup can disrupt your customer’s experience with your brand and may even reduce their level of trust.
Prefer to talk to an expert about your open banking needs? Get in touch with us.
Why use Yapily as an open banking platform
At Yapily, we’re an open banking infrastructure platform. We provide both AISP and PISP services, so you can use our API whether you’re looking for data, payments, or both. Plus, we offer all the technical support you need to leverage the benefits of open banking.
In the rest of this post, we want to share three key reasons why you should consider using Yapily as your open banking API.
1. Access a wide range of payment and data services across the UK and Europe
Without adequate coverage in the markets you enter, you won’t be able to offer your products to all possible users. That’s why coverage is one of the most important factors that affects the quality and usefulness of an open banking API.
Yapily is active in 19 countries across Europe, with over 2000 connections, including key markets such as the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the UK.
We also support a wide range of payment and data features, as we’re both an AISP and a PISP. In terms of payment, we offer bulk payments, sweeping VRP, and commercial VRP.
In terms of data, we offer deep real-time data, including data enrichment, transaction categorisation, and more. In fact, many enterprises rely on Yapily for KYC checks, customer validation, and consumer budgeting tools.
So, whether you want data services, payments, or both, we can help. With Yapily have authorisation to use both PISP and AISP services.
For example, Kolleno, the accounts receivable management software, started using Yapily’s open banking API for our extensive coverage and AIS services.
The platform helps SMEs with reconciliation and provides a place where they can access data into their financial performance, by unifying financial information from their accounting systems, CRMs, and more. Yapily enables Kolleno to add data from open banking too, to get a fuller picture of their finances.
More recently, Kolleno has also started using our PISP services, to automate their payment processes. Now, 45% of Kolleno’s transactions use open banking and, as a result, they’ve seen a 20% reduction in payment delays.
“Support & extensive coverage is key for choosing an open banking vendor as we needed a supportive technical team and an intuitive API to meet our growing needs. We chose Yapily due to its extensive coverage across Europe with thousands of bank institutions.”
Ron Dananberg CTO & co-founder
Read the full case study here: How Kolleno + Yapily are redefining reconciliation and confidence in payments
2. Rely on leading business account connectivity for data and payments
Most open banking providers and resources focus on consumer current accounts. If your core customers use business accounts, that becomes a real limitation. Many banks expose separate APIs for business and consumer accounts, and business connections are harder to obtain and properly test, so coverage and reliability can vary significantly between providers.
At Yapily, business account connectivity is a core focus rather than an add-on. Our platform connects to thousands of banks across 19 European countries, with dedicated support for business, corporate, wealth, and consumer accounts. We rigorously test these connections with real business accounts, so you can trust that your AIS and PIS journeys will work reliably for SMEs and larger enterprises.
This means you can:
Access real time transaction data, balances, and account information from business accounts through AIS
Initiate a full range of payment types from business accounts through PIS, including single immediate payments, bulk payments, scheduled payments, and VRP
For PSPs, lenders, and B2B platforms, this level of tested business account connectivity is what turns open banking from a consumer-only feature into a foundation for your entire business offering.
3. Give your users the best experience possible with hosted or fully white label journeys
For many companies, the priority is to get started with open banking quickly and without a large development project. This is simple with our hosted solution.
With hosted pages, you can go live fast using a highly customisable hosted solution. You can add your own branding elements, such as colours, fonts, and copy, so the payment flow still feels like part of your product while Yapily manages the underlying open banking journey.
For teams that want to design and control every part of the user experience, Yapily also supports a full white label solution through direct integration. With this approach, you build your own customer journeys on top of Yapily’s APIs and infrastructure for complete control over how payments and account connections appear in your product.
By offering both Hosted Pages and Direct Integration, Yapily gives you flexibility. You can start with the quickest path to market and evolve towards fully bespoke experiences as your product and requirements mature.
How Juni uses Yapily’s open banking API
Juni is a financial management platform for ecommerce businesses. It solves a common problem for ecommerce businesses—namely, that they’re having to manage large amounts of transaction data from many different accounts, and often manually. This can be extremely time consuming and has a high risk of error.
Thanks to Yapily’s open banking API, Juni’s platform aggregates ecommerce companies’ data from all their accounts. This way, it gives them a more accurate view of their finances. This in turn provides additional benefits—for example, it helps them to access credit, thanks to more robust transaction data.
While Yapily’s AIS services enable Juni to provide a deeper picture of their customers’ finances, our PIS services also let them offer new payment options too. For instance, with Yapily Payments, Juni’s customers can make instant account-to-account payments.
Together, these services show the flexibility of Yapily’s open banking API. As a result of working with Yapily, Juni has:
Processed over £2 million in open banking payments
Seen a 500% uptake of their reporting product
Increased the number of high-value transactions, demonstrating a growing confidence in open banking.
Find out more by reading the full case study: How Juni + Yapily are supporting ecommerce businesses through open banking
Choose Yapily as your open banking API
In this article, we’ve shared some of the key elements you should consider when selecting an open banking API. Coverage and the types of payment and data services and account connections are critical, while the importance of the reliability of the API should not be underestimated.
At Yapily, we’ve built our open banking API specifically for scalability and flexibility. To find out more about our robust and flexible platform, get in touch with us, or try our open banking sandbox for yourself