With so many open banking providers offering comparable coverage and features on the surface, finding the right partner for your business is harder than it looks.

Data depth, payment capabilities, scalability, and integration support are what separate providers in practice, and these only become visible when you look beyond headline connection counts and feature lists. A provider that works well for a consumer lending platform may not be the right fit for a PSP running high-volume account-to-account payments.

In this article, we explore:

• Key criteria to compare the top open banking providers

• The differences between leading providers, including payment functionality and data capabilities

• Open banking options for customisation, concerning workflows and user experience

• Developer tools and integration support offered by top open banking solutions

Evaluating open banking providers for your product? Book a call with Yapily to talk through coverage, capabilities, and fit for your use case.

How do you choose the best open banking providers?

If you've been investigating open banking solutions, you might have found yourself confused about how each differs in areas like regional coverage, compliance processes, and the level of onboarding and integration support.

To identify the best open banking providers for your needs, it can be helpful to compare them on the following categories:

1. Regional coverage: UK, Europe, and beyond

Most well-known providers boast extensive bank connections, but coverage quality can vary significantly by country, account type, and user journey. A provider with thousands of connections may still fall short if those connections don't align with your priority markets or if performance is inconsistent in the features that matter most to your customers.

To compare providers meaningfully, focus on your real operating needs rather than overall connection counts. Consider the markets you serve today and those you plan to target next, as well as the banks and financial institutions your customers use most.

Questions to ask open banking providers:

• Which markets do you actively support today, and which are on your near-term roadmap?

• Which banks drive the highest volume on your platform in our target regions?

• How consistent is performance across different account types, including business or corporate accounts?

2. Regulatory authorisation for data and payments

Open banking providers fall into three categories: those authorised for account information services (AIS), those authorised for payment initiation services (PIS), and those authorised for both. These permissions determine whether a provider can provide bank account data access, initiate payments between accounts, or offer an integrated combination of the two.

Even if your product only requires data or payments today, choosing a provider that supports both can prevent unnecessary complexity later. For example, a lender may start by using AIS for income verification and risk assessment, but later needs to introduce Pay by Bank or Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) for repayments. Providers that offer both data and payments enable teams to expand functionality over time, such as moving from raw account data to enriched insights or from single payments to bulk payments and variable recurring payments, without re-architecting their product or adding new partners.

Questions to ask open banking providers:

• Do you support AIS, PIS, or both?

• If we start with one, can we expand to the other later without adding a new integration?

• How does your infrastructure perform at scale, and how is reliability secured?

3. Depth of features: payments, data, and scalability

Feature availability can vary by region, so once you've confirmed that a provider holds the necessary authorisations (AIS, PIS, or both) to support your product, it's important to evaluate what a provider actually delivers in the regions where you operate.

On the data side, some providers deliver raw account information only, while others offer enriched data that supports onboarding, KYC, risk assessments, or other advanced analytics. On the payments side, capabilities can range from single payments to bulk transactions, VRPs, and advanced flows tailored to your product needs. A truly scalable provider ensures reliable performance as your transaction volumes and data requests grow, reducing operational risks as you expand.

Questions to ask open banking providers:

• Do you offer raw data only, or enriched data for use cases such as onboarding, KYC, and risk assessment?

• Can you support the specific payment and data flows our product requires, such as AIS, PIS, VRP, and bulk payments?

• Are there any regional limitations for these features that might affect our customer base or growth plans?

4. Customisation and control over branding

Some open banking providers require businesses to use pre-built, provider-branded interfaces, while others allow for fully white-labelled journeys that can be embedded directly into an existing product. Consider how much ownership you need over payment flows, consent screens, and customer touchpoints.

For many businesses, hosted solutions strike the right balance, enabling faster launches while supporting brand alignment and a clear, trusted user experience. Fully white-labelled journeys are useful when there is a specific product or UX requirement, or the open banking connection is a core part of the product. Flexible platforms like Yapily's support both approaches, allowing teams to choose the level of control that fits their use case today and adapt if requirements change over time without forcing complexity where it isn't needed.

Questions to ask open banking providers:

• Can we fully design and own the payment and data flows, or are parts of your interface provider-branded?

• Do you offer hosted pages, direct integrations, or both?

• How much control do we have over messaging and branding throughout the user journey in the hosted solution?

• Can we start with a hosted solution and later transition to a fully embedded experience with your platform?

5. Integration and onboarding support

How a provider supports implementation and ongoing operations can significantly impact time-to-market and long-term success. For developers, the best open banking APIs offer clear documentation, versioned endpoints, and sandbox environments that let teams integrate quickly and confidently. Strong providers build around this with structured onboarding processes and access to knowledgeable support teams during integration.

Beyond launch, a reliable provider will continue to offer technical assistance. Whether through dedicated account managers or responsive technical teams, ongoing support helps your open banking implementation adapt and remain stable as requirements evolve and usage grows.

Questions to ask open banking providers:

• What onboarding support do you offer during integration?

• What developer resources, such as sandbox environments and testing tools, are available?

• How is your technical support structured post-launch?

• Can your teams help troubleshoot issues for complex flows like bulk payments and VRPs?

Top open banking providers

1. Yapily

Yapily is an open banking infrastructure provider that supports both payments and data. The platform connects to thousands of banks and financial institutions, with secure API connectivity and a focus on deep, reliable bank relationships, and it supports real-time account data, account-to-account payments, and enriched insights for building financial products.

Here is what Yapily offers across the criteria above:

Extensive UK and European coverage to support payment and data use cases

Yapily's platform connects to over 2,000 banks and financial institutions across 19 European markets, including the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, through a single integration. Coverage spans consumer, corporate, business, and wealth accounts, and Yapily offers tested business account connectivity across supported markets.

For example, personal finance app Emma uses Yapily's open banking connectivity to power account aggregation and wallet top-ups across multiple European markets, helping accelerate user engagement and transaction volume shortly after launch.

Enterprise-ready AIS and PIS services through a single integration

As businesses scale, it's common for open banking use cases to expand beyond exclusively data or payments. Choosing a provider that supports both AIS and PIS helps teams avoid adding new vendors, duplicating integrations, or increasing operational complexity as products evolve.

Yapily is authorised as both an AISP and PISP, offering enterprise-ready data and payment services through a single, ISO-certified, PSD2-compliant API. Businesses can combine real-time account data with payment capabilities, such as single payments, bulk payments, and variable recurring payments, without redesigning their product or onboarding additional providers. For example, Crezco uses Yapily to streamline payments and automate reconciliation at scale, improving invoice management and cash flow visibility for thousands of merchants.

This flexibility allows teams to start with the use case they need today and expand confidently over time, knowing their open banking infrastructure can support future growth.

Enhance your workflows and user experience with white-label customisation

When payment or consent flows feel disconnected from your product, it can create friction that slows onboarding and increases drop-off rates. Yapily's Hosted Pages are designed to remove that friction, enabling businesses to go live quickly. With support for custom branding elements such as colours, fonts, and copy, our Hosted Pages allow you to deliver a consistent, trusted user journey without the complexity of building and maintaining your own interfaces. Yapily also offers a Direct Integration option for fully white-labelled journeys, well-suited to those businesses that require deeper control over the customer experience.

These options give customers the flexibility to choose the approach that best fits their product strategy, prioritising speed and ease of launch or full ownership of the user journey without compromising user trust.

2. TrueLayer

TrueLayer offers payment initiation (PIS) and account information (AIS) services for UK- and EU-based businesses through a single API.¹ It supports account-to-account payments, including variable recurring payments (VRPs), as well as data access for identity verification and account information retrieval.²

While the platform offers basic data enrichment, its data services are mainly designed to support payments rather than standalone enrichment.

Key features:

• PIS: Yes.²

• Bulk payments: Not publicly stated.²

• VRP: Yes, referred to as 'bank on file'.¹

• AIS: Yes.¹

• Data enrichment: Yes, adds two predicted fields: transaction category and merchant name.³

• Hosted solution: Yes.²

• Fully white label option: Yes (via direct API integration).²

• Tested business account connectivity: Not clearly detailed on public pages.²

3. Tink

Tink is a Swedish open banking provider offering both account information (AIS) and payment initiation (PIS) services across 19 European markets.⁵ The platform enables real-time account data access, A2A payments, and enriched transaction data, including categorisation and merchant identification.⁶ ⁷ Their services are particularly suitable for use cases like personal finance management and credit risk assessment.

Tink also offers white-label and embeddable solutions to maintain brand visibility. Some enterprise-scale payment features, such as bulk payouts, may be less robust than those of providers focused on high-volume transactions.

Key features:

• PIS: Yes.

• Bulk payments: Yes, as an enterprise-scale feature.

• VRP: Limited to Sweeping only.

• AIS: Yes.

• Data enrichment: Yes.⁷

• Hosted solution: Yes.

• Fully white label option: Yes (via API integration).

• Tested business account connectivity: Yes.

4. Token.io

Token.io is a European open banking platform offering both payment initiation (PIS) and account information (AIS) services.⁸ Authorised by the UK's FCA and Germany's BaFin, some of Token's key features include data aggregation and account-to-account payments, including support for VRPs, real-time payouts, and Pay by Bank solutions. The platform also supports hosted and fully white-labelled flows, allowing for quick launches or fully embedded, branded experiences.

One limitation is that Token doesn't provide data enrichment beyond raw account information, which may be a factor for businesses needing categorised data.

Key features:

• PIS: Yes.⁸

• Bulk payments: Yes.

• VRP: Yes.

• AIS: Yes.⁸

• Data enrichment: No.

• Hosted solution: Yes.

• Fully white label option: Yes.

• Tested business account connectivity: Yes.

5. Salt Edge

Salt Edge is a global open banking platform connecting to nearly 5,000 banks across 50+ countries, with the majority of coverage in Europe.⁹ Licensed as both a PISP and AISP, Salt Edge supports basic data enrichment and enables businesses to offer account-to-account payments, including VRPs and bulk payments, alongside access to real-time financial data.¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² Salt Edge also offers hosted and white-labelled flows, allowing businesses to quickly launch with pre-built solutions or embed open banking into their own branded user experiences.

Despite their extensive markets, coverage depth varies by region, so be sure to verify that Salt Edge supports the markets and banks most relevant to your customers.

Key features:

• PIS: Yes.

• Bulk payments: Yes.

• VRP: Yes.

• AIS: Yes.

• Data enrichment: Yes.

• Hosted solution: Yes.

• Fully white label option: Yes.

• Tested business account connectivity: Yes.

6. GoCardless

Unlike some competitors, GoCardless is a UK-based platform that specialises in recurring and direct debit payments across Europe and beyond.¹³ Its focus on subscription and automated payments enables businesses to collect funds directly from customer bank accounts with lower fees and greater reliability than traditional card networks. The platform offers tools for managing recurring flows, handling international transactions, and providing a seamless customer experience with branded payment pages. The company's developer-friendly APIs allow for easy integration and scalable operations.

Since GoCardless does not provide account information services (AIS) or advanced data enrichment, it's best suited for businesses focused on recurring and bulk payments rather than financial data insights.¹⁴

Key features:

• PIS: Yes.

• Bulk payments: Yes, primarily recurring direct debit payments.

• VRP: Yes.

• AIS: No.

• Data enrichment: No.

• Hosted solution: Yes.

• Fully white label option: Yes.

• Tested business account connectivity: Yes.

Partner with a leading open banking solution for payments and data services

As open banking matures, the right provider is the one that fits where your product is heading. The strongest platforms combine reliable coverage, scalable payments and data capabilities, and the flexibility to support evolving products without added complexity.

Yapily brings these elements together through a single, enterprise-ready platform, helping businesses build, launch, and scale open banking use cases with confidence across the UK and Europe.

Ready to access payments and data services across Europe and the UK? Contact our team to evaluate how Yapily's open banking solution can enhance your product and support your growth and customer experience.

Sources

As far as Yapily is aware, the information presented in this article is correct as of 01/01/2026 and has been derived from publicly available sources. Yapily has not undertaken any further investigation or qualification of any information stated in this article to verify the accuracy of information taken from public sources. The data has been sourced directly from the following sources as of 01/01/2026:

1. https://support.truelayer.com/hc/en-us/articles/10973416170769-What-countries-is-TrueLayer-live-in

2. https://truelayer.com/reports/buyers-guide/coverage/

3. https://support.truelayer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008024978-What-data-enrichment-does-TrueLayer-perform-on-banking-data

4. https://docs.truelayer.com/docs/welcome

5. https://tink.com/about-us/

6. https://tink.com/blog/open-banking/what-is-pay-by-bank-2024/

7. https://tink.com/products/data-enrichment/

8. https://token.io/coverage

9. https://www.saltedge.com/

10. https://www.saltedge.com/company/resources/presentation_data_enrichmen

11. https://blog.saltedge.com/vrp-the-hottest-topic/

12. https://www.saltedge.com/products/bulk_payments

13. https://gocardless.com/en-us/

14. https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/posts/what-is-a-bulk-transfer/