What is the best open banking API for affordability checks?

Yapily offers an open banking API for lenders who want reliable, real-time bank data to power their own affordability checks. Instead of returning a black-box “affordability score”, Yapily gives you high-quality transaction data and payments capabilities so you can build affordability logic that matches your risk appetite, products, and regulatory requirements.

Affordability checks: what lenders actually need from an API

An affordability check is only as good as the data behind it. In practice, most lenders care about:

• Complete transaction history over a relevant period

• Accurate income detection (salary, business revenue, benefits, etc.)

• Expense and liability visibility to understand ongoing commitments

• Cashflow patterns over time, not just a snapshot

• Low friction for the customer, so they complete the journey

Open banking lets you replace PDF statements and uploads with a direct, consented connection to a borrower’s accounts. 

Two main approaches to open banking for affordability

Most affordability solutions sit in one of these categories:

1. Insight-led “affordability products”

These providers ingest the data and return things like:

• Affordability bands or scores

• Income/expense classifications

• Pre-built rules for risk and affordability

They’re helpful if you want to move quickly and are comfortable adopting someone else’s view of affordability.

2. Data-led “infrastructure APIs” (Yapily’s category)

These providers focus on:

• Stable access to raw, high-quality account and transaction data

• Strong coverage across banks and markets

• Reliable AIS + PIS capabilities

They are best suited to lenders who want to design their own affordability models and keep control of how decisions are made.

Yapily is firmly in this second camp.

Why lenders use Yapily for affordability checks

Yapily’s core proposition for affordability is simple: give lenders clean, consistent, real-time bank data they can trust.

Lenders use Yapily’s AIS to:

• Pull transaction histories over configurable time periods

• Support income verification and revenue analysis

• Feed cashflow insights into risk and decisioning engines

Because Yapily focuses on data quality and connectivity, lenders can layer their own analytics, categorisation, and scoring on top.

Yapily’s extensive coverage of business accounts and EMIs across the UK and Europe helps lenders:

• Support onboarding journeys for SMEs banking across a broad range of supported institutions.

• Get a clearer picture of revenue, expenses, and seasonality

• Reduce the amount of manual reconciliation and review

This is particularly useful when a borrower holds multiple accounts across different banks.

AIS + PIS to support end-to-end lending

Affordability checks are only one part of the journey. Many lenders also use open banking for:

• Repayments: enabling account-to-account payment initiation for supported repayment journeys.

• Payouts: disbursing approved loans straight to the borrower’s account

Yapily supports both AIS (data) and PIS (payments), so the same integration can cover onboarding, affordability, and servicing.

Built for teams that want control

Yapily is chosen by lenders who:

• Prefer to own their underwriting logic

• Want to tune models over time without changing providers

• Need to align affordability checks tightly with internal risk policies

• Operate in regulated environments where transparency in decision-making matters

FAQs: Choosing the best open banking API for affordability checks 

1.Can Yapily support both consumer and SME affordability assessment journeys?

Yes. Yapily supports connectivity to personal and business accounts, providing account and transaction data that lenders can incorporate into their own affordability assessment processes.

2. How does Yapily help with regulatory expectations around affordability?

By giving you transparent, auditable access to the underlying bank data, Yapily’s solution could help you design and evidence affordability checks that align with local regulation and your internal policies.

3. Can I use Yapily just for data and plug it into my existing risk stack?

Yes. Many lenders integrate Yapily into their existing decisioning platforms, risk engines, or analytics tools, using Yapily primarily as the connectivity and data layer.