Though the leaders of open banking in Europe are the UK and Germany, close on their heels is France as more institutions are participating and offering open banking as a payment and data option. In our 2022 Open Banking League Table¹, France scored 4th position as currently more than 80 banks² offer their APIs to diversify and leverage data from a growing number of TPPs.³
We’ll be taking a look at where open banking adoption currently stands in France, Yapily’s connectivity across the country, and what the future holds.
In this article, we cover:
- Open banking adoption in France
- What the future holds for open banking in France
- Why use Yapily as your open banking platform in France
- Case study: How Pleo boosted their open banking adoption in France with Yapily
Looking for an open banking solution with broad personal and business account connectivity? Book a call with Yapily.
Open banking adoption in France
Initially reluctant, banks in France have rapidly adopted the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) to increase competition as well as benefits to businesses and consumers. Unlike some of its neighbouring countries adopting the Berlin Group’s standard application programming interface (API), French banks use the STET API which provides authorisation, fraud detection, and authentication. This however, also comes with its own standard of implementation, contributing to discrepancies with banks’ adoption and guidelines.
The regulatory body in France, the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR), oversees the PSD2. Almost 95% of French banks adhere to these regulations, including some of its leading financial institutions such as BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, and Societe Generale. Despite taking a cautious approach, the country is committed to open finance innovation.
A 2022 speech by Mr. Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, commented on France’s adoption of open banking, advocating for greater API security and standardisation to improve the system. While acknowledging the potential benefits, he also cautioned against possible risks,“Open finance could accelerate this trend [of market concentration], which can already be seen in the payments market, by allowing the exchange and cross-referencing of an ever-increasing volume of data. This may ultimately prove detrimental to competition.”
In France, there appears to be a stronger inclination towards the open data use cases, such as KYC, accounting, and ERP, rather than the payment offering. Start-ups and fintechs are swayed more to adopt open banking innovation than the larger and more traditional enterprises who seem to be taking a slower approach as they still need to address and overcome concerns of competition and compliance.
Most popular use cases amongst French open banking adopters:
- Account-to-account credit transfers - 37%
- E-commerce payments - 29%
What’s more, an additional 37% expressed interest in using open banking for account to account transfers while 42% would use open banking for e-commerce transactions.
However, there’s a lack of trust that’s holding back greater adoption in France. 62% of consumers say they would not provide data access to use open banking. But, in a 2024 survey, 40% said they would try new payment methods if assured of higher security standards.
What the future holds for open banking in France
On a macro level, Forrester reports that the adoption of open banking services across European countries will likely more than double between 2022 and 2027 as interest grows and financial institutions seek alternative payment solutions. Forrester combined their own data with insights from open banking solution providers, including Yapily.
According to Forrester, this growth should accelerate, “We expect the gap between consumer interest and adoption to narrow through 2027 as the open banking ecosystem resolves some key challenge…”
With PSD3 on the horizon, this will likely also spur on greater adoption due to higher standardisation of regulations as well as more sophisticated security measures and consumer protection.
Specifically with France, open banking adoption already appears on the upswing. When surveyed on the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) payment method, this is how French consumers responded:
- 41% have access and use it
- 15% have access but do not use it
- 18% do not have access to it
- 9% have never heard of it
- 16% have heard of the service but do not know if they have access to it
And consumer access to SCT Inst rose 9% from 2022 to 2024.
But there still needs to be greater education and recognition of the benefits of open banking. Improved communication about the improved user experience, increased security, financial services inclusion, and speed of settlement times should all contribute to greater adoption in the years to come.
Adoption could be spurred on with open banking working groups which bring together regulators, banks, and third-party providers across the country that will focus on clear standardisation, regulations, and effective ways to communicate the benefits.
We saw this occur in the UK which was a significant contributing factor to recognising the impact and stability across regulations and compliance. By following suit of the Berlin Group, France could experience a more unified and standard process that facilitates greater competition and transparency.
Why use Yapily as your open banking platform in France
To take part in France’s growing ecosystem, Yapily can help implement open banking into your business. As an open banking infrastructure, we enable technical connectivity with financial institutions and create standardised methods for securely accessing and transmitting financial data. This enables you to build custom solutions to suit your customers without having to worry about creating an open banking foundation yourself.
As the leading open banking infrastructure provider in Europe, we power some of the most successful payment and data solutions, such as Adyen, Alipay, Volt, and Intuit Quickbooks.
Here are three reasons our top customers partner with us:
1. Connect to a wide range of financial institutions in France and beyond to gain a commercial advantage
When looking to add open banking payments or data services in France, make sure your open banking provider has extensive coverage—the connections to various banks and financial institutions with open banking APIs.
Having broad coverage helps you gain an edge in many ways:
- Wider customer reach. The more banks you can connect to, the larger your customer base. Merchant’s customers will not need to switch banks to use your services.
- Consolidated financial view. Merchants can let customers manage accounts across different banks in one place. B2B solutions like lenders can aggregate data to have a complete picture of their end customer’s financial situation and facilitate decision-making.
- Competitive advantage. You can differentiate your offering from competitors with more limited connections.
- Reduced technical burden. Working with a single provider that has extensive connections saves you from building and maintaining individual integrations with each bank.
- Future-proofing. As open banking expands in France, a provider with a demonstrated ability to connect broadly is more likely to keep up with new institutions joining the ecosystem so you can continue to grow, even across borders.
Yapily is an open banking platform providing access to nearly 2,000 banks and financial institutions across 19 countries—through a single API integration. In France, we offer connections to 100+ institutions. See our live coverage tracker.
Unlike many open banking providers, Yapily’s coverage does not stop at just consumer account connectivity. We also cover business, wealth and corporate accounts, enabling you to serve both B2C and B2B models and a variety of use cases.
By partnering with one provider with extensive coverage and account connectivity, you will not have to manage multiple relationships. You can also expand your customer base across borders more easily as you grow.
2. Use our authorisation to access both data services and payments
If you are considering becoming an authorised provider of open banking payments and data services, this can take a considerable amount of time. Instead, you can leverage our authorisation so you can launch your open banking solutions much more quickly.
We are an authorised payment initiation service provider (PISP) and an account information service provider (AISP) in France, Europe and the UK. Through one API and provider, you can offer both data services and payments.
For payments, you can access:
- Single, recurring, and scheduled account-to-account payments
- Variable recurring payments
- Bulk payments
With Yapily, you can also tap into a range of data services:
- Yapily Data gives you access to general account information—from account owner and merchant name to bank name and transaction history—which you can use for income verification, KYC checks, creditworthiness and affordability assessments, and more.
- Yapily Plus offers enriched data to automate data analysis to better understand end customers’ financial behavior. Merchants can see 70+ outgoing and 20+ incoming transaction categories so they can build financial profiles and create more personalised products.
- Yapily Validate enables faster onboarding processes by validating customer and account information in real time. This helps boost your customers’ conversion rates while optimizing the customer experience.
Our comprehensive suite of payment and data capabilities, available through our existing authorisations, allows you to deliver robust open banking solutions to your customers without having to become an authorised open banking provider yourself.
3. Launch fast with hosted pages, then keep your brand top of mind with a white-label solution, and scale with enterprise-ready infrastructure
Launching your open banking solution can pose some challenges. We know time to market is often an issue—the lengthy development cycles of building customer-facing banking interfaces from scratch can hold you back. Or maybe you do not have the resources or the technical know-how to build an experience that does not feel disconnected from the rest of your product.
Yapily can support you as you start and scale.
Our hosted pages speed up your launch. These pre-built user interfaces (UIs) can create a smooth product experience, guiding end-customers through the payment process, without any development required from you.
You can even customise these pages to meet your brand’s style and colors. And we support both embedded and direct authorisation flows, which depend on the financial institution. You can start with hosted pages to go to market quicker, then work on building a customised payment flow later on.
Our API also enables a white-label solution, allowing you complete ownership of the customer experience within a totally branded environment.
Most importantly, our API is enterprise ready. We can support you as you start up and when you’re ready to grow, ensuring smooth and secure payment processing at scale. With ISO certification and enterprise-grade security, our API can handle large transaction volumes without compromising performance or the end-customer experience.
You will have dedicated onboarding support and expert consultation to optimize open banking integrations, reducing your time to market and enhancing overall performance and user adoption.
Case study: How Pleo boosted their open banking adoption in France with Yapily
Pleo, the leading business spend management platform, turned to Yapily to help speed up the money transfer process for its clients spread across Europe. Business managers faced lengthy, manual payment processes when topping up Pleo wallets.
This caused delays in funds landing in accounts, unnecessary cash flow uncertainty and friction in the product experience.
Yapily provided Pleo with the open banking infrastructure needed to create a seamless payment experience. With a single API integration, Pleo had extensive bank coverage to support their existing customer base and meet their expansion plans.
Pleo launched the new solution in the UK, Netherlands, and France. Managers there now had an easy and efficient way to make instant account top-ups without needing to manually enter bank details or visit their bank webpages.
The results were clear:
- Pleo customers paid €7.3 million into accounts via Yapily’s open banking infrastructure
- Over 80% of customers returned to use open banking for repeat account top-ups
- Consistent month-on-month growth of open banking as Pleo customers’ preferred payment method
*“Following the immediate, positive response from our customer base in the UK, France and the Netherlands, we are expanding the offering into more of our core markets and seizing on innovations in open banking, such as Variable Recurring Payments, to deliver an even more seamless customer experience” *— Mette Gade, Pleo Chief Product Officer
Pleo now offers variable recurring payments (VRPs) with Yapily to further facilitate clients’ business spend needs. Rolled out to their French, Dutch and British customers, this solution allows them to automatically sweep money into Pleo wallets when funds reach a set threshold.
Thanks to the Yapily partnership, Pleo:
- Eliminated friction and manual work in their customers’ payment journey
- Removed cash flow uncertainty
- Simplified expansion into new markets
- Improved overall customer experience
Read more about the Pleo-Yapily partnership here.
Choose our powerful open banking API to connect across France
France is poised to have greater open banking adoption as we’ve seen increased efforts and recognition of its innovation. With our vast connectivity across French banks and financial institutions, get started with us today.
Speak to our open banking experts to explore our platform and discover how we can help your business connect to France.
Sources:
