As a wealth management platform, your clients expect more than just strong returns. They expect a seamless, digital-first experience with fast onboarding, real-time insights from their wealth manager, and a personalised service.
However, outdated, manual processes can make delivering on that promise more difficult than it needs to be. You might be dealing with:
Delayed onboarding: Manual KYC checks, identity verification, and payout validation slow down the process, reducing conversions and delaying assets under management.
Frustrating deposits: Clients have to leave your platform to make card transfers or set up manual bank transfers, resulting in friction, drop-offs, and lost revenue.
Limited financial visibility: Without access to real-time bank data, it’s hard to get the insight you need into clients’ financial situations. It’s challenging to quickly and accurately assess product suitability, offer personalised financial advice, or spot opportunities for growth.
Manual reconciliation: Ops teams spend a lot of time logging into bank portals and manually matching payments, not helped by erroneous payment references. This is both time-consuming and prone to human error.
Open banking can help solve all of these problems. By connecting you directly to your clients’ bank accounts, open banking enables faster onboarding, instant pay-ins in a few clicks, and access to comprehensive, accurate financial information.
In this article, we’ll explore how open banking can turn operational bottlenecks into strategic advantages for wealth management platforms and how to integrate it into your platform.
In this article:
How wealth management firms can benefit from open banking
How open banking helps different teams within a wealth platform
Why should wealth management platforms choose Yapily?
Unlock the power of open banking in wealth management with Yapily
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How wealth management firms can benefit from open banking.
Here are five key benefits of open banking for wealth management platforms:
1. Onboard clients faster
Fast, seamless onboarding is critical for any wealth management platform. It’s your first major client touchpoint, and a slow or error-prone process can impact both growth and customer satisfaction. But too often, onboarding is bogged down by manual identity checks, slow account validation and avoidable data entry errors.
Think of the typical delays: waiting on clients to submit documents, realising something’s missing, and chasing follow-ups. This back-and-forth wastes time and adds friction.
Open banking removes these hurdles. By connecting directly to a client’s bank account, you can instantly validate their nominated account details and ownership. There’s no need for unnecessary paperwork or manual verification. You simply access the real-time financial information you need through their bank’s API.
2. Reduce third-party payment risks
Open banking also helps reduce the risks of fraud and money laundering associated with third-party payments. Verifying the source of funds protects your platform and facilitates compliance with regulatory obligations.
By validating bank accounts from the start, you can confirm that incoming payments originate from accounts owned by your clients. And when you layer in Payment Initiation, you ensure funds can only be paid in from the same account that was validated at sign-up — removing the risk of third parties funding an account from elsewhere.
For example, if someone tries to fund ‘John Smith’s Investment Account’ from ‘ABC Ventures Ltd,’ but that business account hasn’t been linked to John, the payment initiation flow stops the transaction automatically.
This gives your compliance team a clear audit trail while flagging suspicious activity instantly.
3. Enables frictionless funding and recurring contributions
Traditional payments for wealth platforms, whether that’s through manual bank transfers or card payments, often create friction. You can end up paying high card fees and risk losing clients if they abandon contributions due to a clunky experience.
Open banking Payment Initiation Services (PIS) (also known as Pay by Bank) is removing these barriers. Clients can make instant, direct account-to-account payments with just a few taps. No cards, no manual entry, and autofill ensures a smooth, error-free process.
Instead of setting up payments in their banking app, clients click a secure link and can complete the payment from within your platform. Depending on your proposition, contributions can also be automated using Variable Recurring Payments (VRP), which enables top-ups, round-ups and regular deposits to help grow portfolios effortlessly, as well as one-click deposits.
For those experiencing a high number of unfunded accounts which don’t get used, why not incorporate a Payment Link into your ‘Account Open’ emails to customers, making it quick and easy to fund the account in a few clicks as soon as the account becomes operational.
Pay by Bank runs on Faster Payments, so funds settle instantly.
4. Gives real-time visibility of your client's finances
Without full financial visibility, it’s difficult to offer tailored advice. Portfolios alone don’t show income, spending, savings, or liabilities, each of which is essential for managing risk and identifying opportunities.
Open banking gives you real-time insight into a client’s finances. Once they connect their bank account, you gain ongoing access to live customer data for up to 90 days. That means no more chasing bank statements or waiting for outdated information.
You can instantly see income patterns, spending habits, and idle ‘lazy cash’, helping you categorise transactions, track regular payments, and uncover opportunities. This enables you to offer more relevant and personalised advice, helping to identify ways for your clients to grow their wealth.
For example, a client may have a strong, diversified portfolio, but you might not realise they are regularly overdrawing their current account or sitting on £1,000 of unused cash each month.
Open banking reveals this, allowing you to proactively adjust their risk profile or suggest better ways to put that cash to work. The result is stronger financial planning, deeper trust and more timely recommendations.
5. Speeds up reconciliation and increases accuracy
Reconciling client payments shouldn’t drain your team’s time. Yet many wealth managers still log into multiple bank accounts, manually match transactions, and correct errors one by one.
Open banking streamlines this process. By connecting your settlement accounts directly to internal systems, you create a secure, centralised feed of real-time transactions ready for reconciliation.
Incoming payments are instantly matched to the right client using clear business rules or AI-powered logic. This reduces errors, cuts down manual work and frees your team to focus on higher-value tasks.
Beyond the bank data feeds powering this, any customer pay-ins which have been initiated via open banking will be prepopulated with the correct payment reference, every time!
How open banking helps different teams within a wealth platform
Every team in your platform plays a role in delivering a seamless, compliant and personalised client experience. Open banking doesn’t just improve one part of the journey: it helps product, compliance, operations and advisory teams work faster and smarter, with fewer manual tasks and greater visibility.Here’s how open banking can help different teams:
Wealth manager
Without full financial context, it’s hard to give truly tailored advice. Open banking fills the gaps that portfolios alone can’t show, such as monthly income, regular outgoings, and ‘lazy cash’ sitting idle. Once a client connects their account, wealth managers can view live data for up to 90 days; meanwhile, logic can be applied to surface patterns and highlight opportunities automatically.
Rather than relying on static fact-finds or assumptions, advisors can utilise live insights to recommend timely and relevant actions, thereby boosting outcomes and deepening trust.
Compliance team
Open banking helps compliance teams move faster while reducing regulatory risk. Instead of asking clients to upload PDFs or send documents by email, you can cross check the client’s name against their bank account confirm account ownership and capture accurate bank details instantly. This makes KYC smoother, reduces risk and gives your compliance team greater confidence in the source of funds.
Furthermore, Payment Initiation can be configured to be only possible from an account which has already been validated using open banking data. This helps to ensure funds come only from the first party, therefore helping to combat the risk of money laundering.
Product team
Product teams can use open banking data sharing to build smarter, more personalised features, from automated cash sweeps and real-time alerts, to dynamic contribution flows and better onboarding experiences.
Operations and payments
Operations teams often spend too much time logging into bank portals, manually matching transactions and fixing errors. Open banking creates a direct, real-time feed between your settlement accounts and internal systems, enabling automatic reconciliation and accurate client matching.
Incoming payments can be enriched and tagged using clear business rules or AI logic, drastically reducing error rates and admin time. It’s also easier to trace funds, confirm receipt and deliver a smoother overall user experience to Client and Support teams alike.
Why should wealth management platforms choose Yapily?
As you’ve seen, open banking services are reshaping how wealth managers onboard clients, manage payments and deliver personalised advice. Yapily provides the infrastructure to lead this shift with confidence.
Our platform offers one of the widest ranges of direct bank connectivity across the UK and Europe, giving you secure access to consumer, business and corporate accounts. Wherever your clients bank, you can retrieve the real-time data needed to deliver timely, tailored insights, or you can enable seamless, prepopulated pay-ins which clients can initiate in a few simple clicks.
Yapily is a regulated, developer-friendly platform trusted by financial institutions like Adyen, Allica Bank, and Pleo. Whether you’re building new tools, automating compliance, or growing assets under management, we provide the infrastructure and support to help you move faster, operate more efficiently and scale with confidence.
Here’s what sets Yapily apart from other open banking platforms:
Enterprise-grade open banking infrastructure with direct access to over 2000 banks across 19 countries
Yapily’s unified API gives you direct, secure access to over 2,000 banks across 19 European countries, supporting both data and payments without reliance on third-party aggregators or fragmented local integrations.
Built for scale, our ISO 27001-certified platform connects directly to banks to ensure consistent uptime, low latency and reliable performance across every transaction. From high-frequency contributions to complex account verifications, your infrastructure stays fast, stable and compliant.
You get full European coverage through one integration, eliminating the need to stitch together vendors or build custom flows for each region. And with dedicated support from integration through to optimisation, Yapily helps your platform scale efficiently, with fewer dependencies and less complexity.
Offer Pay by Bank and Data services to consumer, business and corporate accounts
Yapily provides deep connectivity to consumer, business and corporate bank accounts: essential for wealth platforms that manage client deposits, recurring contributions and financial data at scale.
Unlike many providers, Yapily connects directly to both consumer and business/corporate accounts across Europe’s largest banks. We support dual-authorisation flows, corporate logins and high-volume payment use cases - often not supported by aggregators.
Through a single API, you can access the full spectrum of open banking capabilities:
Pay by Bank: Let clients fund accounts with instant, direct bank transfers. Enable single payments for top-ups, performed in a few clicks from within your platform, or via payment links embedded into any electronic communication.
Variable Recurring Payments: Automate recurring or dynamic contributions using real-time payment rails. No card fees, no Bacs delays, and full flexibility for top-ups and smart deposit flows.
Account Information Services: Retrieve real-time balance and transaction data with client consent to reduce manual document collection and improve onboarding, compliance and suitability checks.
Transaction enrichment: Use Yapily Data Plus to categorise over 70 types of expenditure and 30 income streams. Clean merchant names, flag high-risk transactions and generate deeper insights across your platform.
Yapily Validate: Instantly confirm account ownership and ensure deposits come from verified client accounts. This reduces fraud, improves payment success rates, and streamlines onboarding.
All of this is delivered through a single, secure integration, simplifying your workflows, reducing operational overheads, and helping you deliver a next-gen customer experience across onboarding, compliance and portfolio management.
Get started fast with our Hosted Solutions
If you’re exploring open banking for the first time, speed and simplicity matter. Yapily’s Hosted Solution provides the fastest way to launch. It’s a ready-to-use, PSD2-compliant user interface that lets you offer open banking functionality with minimal development work. The interface is fully branded with your colours, logo and fonts, so your clients stay within a familiar experience from start to finish.
Our Hosted Solution is ideal for platforms that want to test and prove value before investing in your own tailored user journey. You can launch quickly, capture early results and refine your workflows, all while delivering a seamless experience to clients.
When you’re ready to scale or want full control over the UX, you can upgrade to our Direct Integration with no need to change your API or reconnect banks. Direct Integration gives you complete control over the interface and flow. It’s fully white-labeled and sits inside your application, enabling you to design seamless journeys and integrate open banking directly into your platform.
Unlock the power of open banking for wealth management with Yapily
Open banking enables faster onboarding, seamless payments, real-time financial insights, and stronger compliance, all through a single, secure API. Yapily provides the infrastructure that makes it work at scale.
With deep connectivity, enterprise-grade performance and hands-on support, we help wealth management services of all sizes deliver a better client experience and a notable competitive edge.
Book a call with one of Yapily’s open banking experts today and see how we can help you move faster.