Discover how open banking is changing the banking sector, providing faster, more secure ways to access banking data and initiate payments.
If you’re a financial institution, you’re probably already familiar with the promise of open banking. You know it can streamline operations, reduce fraud, and deliver a better customer experience. But turning that promise into something practical can be challenging.
You might be asking:
Where can open banking genuinely improve efficiency or reduce costs?
Which parts of the customer journey benefit most from real-time data or payments?
What does integration actually look like inside a regulated environment?
This guide breaks down the most impactful use cases for open banking and how it works in practice. You’ll see how other financial institutions are using open banking data, and what it takes to integrate it into your own infrastructure.
Yapily provides the open banking infrastructure behind leading banks, lenders and fintech companies across Europe. Book a call to learn more about how you can implement secure, scalable open banking use cases with Yapily.
Payment Initiation Service (PIS) use cases for financial institutions
PIS—also known as Pay by Bank—enables financial service providers to offer a faster,more secure way for customers to make pay-ins. By enabling direct account-to-account payments from within your app or platform, PIS removes friction, reduces errors and improves both the customer experience and operational efficiency. Here are some common use cases:
1. Account top-ups/deposits (Single Payments)
Topping up an account in 2025 shouldn’t feel like a chore. Yet for many customers, it still involves clunky manual transfers, slow settlement times and the risk of delayed reconciliation if they mistype a reference number.
With Pay by Bank, deposits become seamless. Initiated from your app or platform, customers authorise the payment in a few taps, and the funds arrive instantly: no manual entry, no missed references and no delays.
It’s a far better experience for customers and a smoother process for your team, thanks to:
Instant settlement through Faster Payments or SEPA Instant
All payment details are pre-populated for error-free transfers
Automatic reconciliation with precise references every time
This means that financial institutions can reduce support queries, accelerate funding flows and boost customer satisfaction.Learn more: How open banking is transforming account and wallet top-ups
2. Recurring collections & contributions (Variable Recurring Payments)
VRP offers a smarter, more flexible alternative to traditional Direct Debits, especially for unsecured lending, savings and everyday account contributions.
Unlike Direct Debit, which rely on slower Bacs rails and can fail due to incorrect details or insufficient funds, VRP uses Faster Payments to settle instantly. This ensures no delays or errors, and eliminates the need for manual intervention. VRP can also automatically check there are sufficient funds before initiating the payment.
For financial institutions, this results in lower processing costs, fewer failed payments and real-time visibility and control.
But VRP isn’t just for collections. Forward-thinking institutions are using it to enable one-click deposits, automated regular contributions into savings accounts, and even dynamic contributions based on customer behaviour.
VRP has mostly been limited to sweeping: moving funds between a user’s own accounts. However, a new wave of commercial VRP (cVRP) will soon allow authorised third parties to initiate variable payments across different accounts and providers, unlocking far broader use cases across lending, investment and subscription payments.
Want to be informed when commercial VRP rolls out? Sign up to our cVRP Beta program.
3. Arrears collections and timely funding of new accounts
Chasing arrears or waiting for new accounts to be funded is a resource-intensive process that delays key operations.
Open banking simplifies this process by embedding payment initiation links directly into arrears reminders or account opening notifications, which can be sent via email, SMS, or even WhatsApp. This empowers your customers to take immediate action without needing to manually log in to their bank or input payment details.
For example, a lender might send an SMS reminder to a customer who has missed a repayment. Instead of prompting them to log in elsewhere or call support, the message includes a secure payment link. The customer clicks and approves the payment through their banking app, and the funds are settled instantly.
This reduces friction and helps ensure accounts are funded on time. The result is a seamless experience for customers and greater operational efficiency for your team.
Account information service (AIS) use cases for financial institutions
AIS provides financial institutions with real-time access to customers' financial information, subject to their explicit consent. This removes the need for manual document uploads or outdated statements. Here are a few common AIS use cases for financial institutions:
1. Customer onboarding/compliance
Open banking data can play a crucial role in streamlining onboarding and meeting compliance requirements, eliminating the need for PDF downloads and lengthy back-and-forth emails.
With AIS, you can:
Instantly match a customer’s name to their bank account at a regulated institution
Pre-fill bank details with near 100% accuracy, reducing errors and manual entry
Confirm account ownership using Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)
This is especially useful in wealth management, where ensuring pay-outs are only sent to a client-owned account is crucial. AIS can be used to validate nominated accounts during onboarding—typically in a fully self-serve flow—and you can then restrict future deposits (via PIS) to only be initiated from that same validated account. This greatly speeds up customer onboarding while reducing AML risk.
2. Credit decisioning and ongoing monitoring of revolving facilities/source of funds
For lenders, assessing risk and affordability is critical, but the traditional process can be slow, manual, and often reliant on incomplete data.
With open banking, applicants can connect their bank accounts directly to your platform. This provides real-time access to enriched transaction data, removing the need for manual sharing and review of bank statements: a labour-intensive process that is open to human error.
This is where open banking can make a big difference. Our categorisation engine goes beyond simple balance checks. It identifies and labels over 30 types of income and 70 types of expenditure—including high-risk transactions like gambling and multiple types of debt repayment—while also enriching merchant names.
This gives you a much deeper view into customer data, behaviour and financial health, so you can:
Lend to more customers with confidence
Reduce reliance on blunt credit score proxies
Automate elements of your decision-making engine
Strengthen your approach to affordability and risk
Learn more: Open banking for lenders: How to choose the right platform
3. Account aggregation
Open banking enables financial institutions to offer customers a single view of their financial life across multiple banks and accounts.
By combining this aggregated data with transaction categorisation, you can build powerful Personal and Business Financial Management (PFM and BFM) propositions. These insights help users spot idle (lazy) cash, reduce unnecessary spending and make smarter financial decisions, enabling you to offer them tailored financial products that suit their needs.
For wealth managers, account aggregation provides a real-time snapshot of a client’s broader financial position. This supports more tailored guidance, improves suitability assessments and reduces manual fact-finding.
As Open Finance expands to include portfolios, pensions, mortgages and other financial products, the potential for richer customer experiences and stronger financial outcomes will only grow.
The result is deeper engagement, more opportunities to serve your customers and a future-ready approach to financial wellbeing.
How to get started with open banking
Whether you want to enable seamless data sharing, initiate payments, or both, there are two main routes to integrating open banking.
1. Become a regulated provider: Apply for your own AISP or PISP licence under the Payment Services Directive (PSD2), manage your own direct bank connections, and comply with Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) requirements.
This route gives you maximum control, but it’s slow, complex and expensive. It often takes 6–12 months or more and requires in-depth technical and regulatory expertise.
2. Use a regulated open banking platform like Yapily: Yapily is fully licensed as both a PISP and an AISP, meaning you can operate under Yapily’s regulated status instead of applying for your own licence. Yapily is regulated by the FCA and is listed in the UK Open Banking ecosystem. The UK Open Banking Directory was initially established by the CMA to enable PSD2 compliance for the nine largest UK banks, but Yapily is integrated with a far broader list of institutions.
For teams with development resources, Yapily’s Direct Integration offers full UI control. You embed the journey into your platform, and Yapily handles everything behind the scenes, including consent, authentication and connectivity.
If you need to move faster, Yapily’s Hosted Pages provide a compliant, branded user flow out of the box. Many clients start here to test demand or go live quickly, then move to direct integration later.
Learn more about how to connect with open banking APIs
Why financial institutions and fintechs choose Yapily
Yapily is an open banking infrastructure provider trusted by leading financial institutions and fintechs across Europe. Its platform gives you secure, direct access to thousands of banks, enabling real-time payments, enriched financial data, and compliant customer experiences. With a single API, you can build and scale open banking use cases across onboarding, credit decisioning, account funding, and more.
One API for payments, data, and enrichment
Yapily offers a unified platform for both open banking data services and Pay by Bank: all through a single, developer-friendly Application Programming Interface (API). This means you don’t need multiple vendors or duplicated workflows. You can build end-to-end journeys, such as onboarding, lending, repayments and top-ups, all through one vendor and integration.
Yapily supports a full range of account-to-account payments, including:
Single payments: Let customers top up accounts, make deposits, or send money instantly and with full pre-population of payment details.
Variable Recurring Payments: Enable secure, flexible recurring payments for use cases like unsecured debt collection, automated contributions, or one-click deposits. VRP settles via Faster Payments (not Bacs), reducing failure rates and processing times.
Bulk Payments: Initiate multiple payments in one action. Perfect for invoice runs, supplier payments, or freelancer payouts, all using real-time rails like Faster Payments and SEPA Instant.
All payment flows come with SCA built in, eliminating the need for you to manage complex redirect or security flows yourself.
Broad, deep connectivity across 19 countries in Europe
Yapily connects to nearly 2,000 banks across 19 European countries. One of our greatest strengths is our account connectivity. With Yapily, you can connect to consumer, corporate, and business accounts, all through the same integration. Unlike many providers, Yapily has built its connections in-house, rather than aggregating them from others. That means faster response times, fewer errors and more consistent data.
It also means better performance where it counts: dual-signatory support, corporate bank logins and business account access.
This makes Yapily especially well-suited to banks, lenders and fintechs working with high-volume, regulated or commercial use cases.
Enriched data for deeper insights
Yapily’s Data Plus solution adds intelligence to raw bank data. It enriches transactions with clean merchant names, assigns category labels across 70+ expenditure types and 30+ income types (including gambling and debt repayments), and standardises formatting across banks.
This is crucial for use cases like:
Credit decisioning
Risk modelling
Personal or business financial management
Income and affordability checks
Instead of building your own enrichment layer, you get out-of-the-box insights that plug directly into your systems.
Faster, more reliable onboarding with Validate
Validate makes it easy to verify account ownership and capture accurate bank details, without relying on PDFs or manual entry.
It verifies the account holder’s name against a live bank account and ensures the details belong to the correct individual or business, helping you reduce fraud, prevent failed payments and streamline the onboarding process.
Combined with payment restrictions (E.g. only allowing pay-ins from verified accounts), Yapily Validate helps financial institutions implement secure, self-serve journeys for account setup and transfers.
Pleo: Enabling instant account funding and trusted verification
Pleo set out to remove friction from business spending, but topping up company wallets remained a slow, manual process for many finance teams. Users had to leave the platform, log in to their bank, and wait for funds to arrive, often introducing delays and cash flow uncertainty.
By integrating Yapily’s open banking infrastructure, Pleo now enables customers to top up their accounts instantly through secure, pre-populated bank transfers. The process is completed entirely within the Pleo platform, removing the need to enter bank details or switch between apps.
This improvement has seen strong adoption across multiple markets:
€7.3 million in top-ups across the UK, Netherlands and France
80% of users return to open banking for repeat top-ups
60% of Dutch users completed their first top-up via open banking
Yapily’s extensive bank coverage and single API also support Pleo’s expansion into new European markets without the need to manage local payment integrations.
Read the full case study: How Pleo & Yapily are changing businesses' spend management
Emma: Aggregating accounts across Europe for a richer user experience
Emma helps users take control of their finances by bringing all their accounts, transactions, and budgets into one app. To make this work across different banks and regions, Emma needed an open banking provider with broad coverage, consistent data quality, and reliable performance.
With Yapily, Emma connects securely to thousands of UK and European banks through a single API. Yapily’s infrastructure enables Emma to aggregate account data in real-time, providing users with a clear, unified view of their financial lives, regardless of where they bank.
Beyond aggregation, Yapily supports Emma’s wallet top-ups and investment functionality. Users can now transfer money instantly between accounts, top up their Emma Invest walle,t and start trading from a pool of over 2,000 fractional global stocks —all without leaving the app.
Since partnering with Yapily, Emma has:
Enabled 30,000+ users to start investing in the first month alone
Delivered a 267% month-on-month increase in transaction value
Seen total payment consents in just 3 months that exceed the previous 12 months combined
Become the highest-charting budgeting app built entirely on open banking in the Apple App Store
Read the full case study: How Emma and Yapily are helping people make smarter financial decisions
Unlock the power of open banking in your infrastructure with Yapily
From accelerating account funding to automating credit checks and streamlining onboarding, open banking is already delivering tangible results for financial institutions across Europe. Yapily makes it easier to implement these use cases inside your own systems, with secure APIs, deep bank coverage, and expert support every step of the way.
Book a call to explore how Yapily can help you build the right open banking use cases for your business.