• What you’re building
• Your internal resources
• Whether you’re pursuing your own regulatory licence or leveraging a platform’s regulated status
• The features you want to offer

When considering how long it takes to integrate open banking, it’s important to understand whether your priority is speed, control, or regulatory compliance.

If you’re looking to get up and running quickly, using an open banking provider like Yapily is clearly the fastest and most efficient route.

In this article, we’ll break down the key factors that affect integration timelines and explore the options available to help you get started faster.

How long does it take to integrate open banking?

Here’s a breakdown of the most common integration approaches and how long it takes.

*The figures here serve as a guide only and can vary significantly depending on your business type, internal resources, and specific use cases. *

Integration Approaches: What to Expect Based on Your Setup

What affects open banking integration time?

• In-house vs using an open banking solution: Building yourself takes longer, especially if you need a licence.
• Use case complexity: Implementing straightforward features like account verification or balance checks can be done in a few weeks. More advanced use cases, such as integrating open banking into a full lending journey with income analysis, affordability checks, and repayment automation, take longer and often require coordination across multiple teams.
• Hosted vs white-label UX: Hosted flows are quicker to launch. White-label takes longer but offers more control. Some platforms (like Yapily) allow you to launch with hosted, while designing a white-label direct integration behind the scenes.
• Regulatory status: If you’re not already authorised, the licensing process adds significant time.
• Market and region: Standards and user expectations vary by country.
• Internal resources: A skilled, well-resourced team will naturally move faster.

Your timeline to integrate open banking depends greatly on your ability to navigate technical requirements, regulatory hurdles, and user experience design.

What does it mean to integrate with open banking?

Integrating open banking means enabling your product to securely connect to a user’s bank account, with their consent, to either:

• Access account data (AIS): such as checking balances, transactions, and identity details. This is often used for account verification, affordability checks, and financial insights.
• Initiate payments (PIS): which involves moving funds directly from a user’s bank account, for example, to top up a wallet, collect repayments, or pay an invoice.

Both AIS and PIS functions can be incorporated into a single integration, enabling seamless access to data and payment initiation through compliant APIs.

These capabilities are delivered through APIs exposed by banks under PSD2 in the UK and EU. But integration involves more than just connecting to a bank. It requires a range of technical, regulatory, and user experience (UX) components.

What are the steps involved in integrating open banking?

Each of the following steps is crucial to delivering a functional and compliant open banking experience. How much of it you need to build depends on whether you choose to build an in-house solution or work with an open banking platform like Yapily**.**

1. Connect to multiple banks

If you’re building in-house:

You will need to integrate with each bank individually. While all banks offer PSD2-compliant APIs, their implementations differ significantly. You can expect variations in authentication methods, consent expiry times, error formats, and data structures.

If you’re using a provider like Yapily:

You get access to thousands of banks through a single API. The provider handles all the complexity of individual bank connections, so you don’t need to manage each one yourself.

Integrating multiple banks manually adds time, especially when each one has its own technical specifications and requirements for open banking APIs.

2. Design user consent flows

If you’re building in-house:

You must create secure, compliant user journeys that allow customers to:

• Select their bank
• Understand what they are authorising, whether data access or payment initiation
• Review terms and privacy notices
• Authenticate and return to your platform after consent

If you’re using a provider like Yapily:

Consent and authentication flows are already built. You can use prebuilt hosted pages or embed these flows directly into your app, saving time and ensuring compliance.

3. Support Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)

If you’re building in-house:

You are responsible for initiating and managing SCA flows. This includes redirecting users to their bank, handling authentication failures, and managing the return to your platform.

If you’re using a provider like Yapily:

The platform handles the full SCA process, including redirect logic and bank-specific behaviours, so your team doesn’t have to manage them manually.

SCA compliance is a mandatory requirement under PSD2, and managing it correctly is essential to ensure secure user authentication during data access or payments.

4. Ensure security and regulatory compliance

If you’re building in-house:

You will need to implement security and privacy measures such as:

• End-to-end encryption
• Secure data transmission and storage
• Role-based access controls
• GDPR compliance and audit logging
• Regulatory approval as an AISP or PISP if you plan to access or initiate payments directly

If you’re using a provider like Yapily:

Regulatory compliance is handled on your behalf. You operate under the platform’s licence, with all required controls already in place.

5. Normalise bank data and payment formats

If you’re building in-house:

Banks don’t follow a single standard for formatting account data or payment fields. You will need to build logic to clean, translate, and normalise data from each provider.

If you’re using a provider like Yapily:

The platform delivers consistent, normalised data across all connected banks. This reduces development time and simplifies how you handle payments and account information inside your product.

Data normalisation ensures a consistent developer experience across varying bank formats, enabling scalable open banking integration.

The fastest way to integrate with open banking

If speed and simplicity are your priority, the fastest way to integrate with open banking is to use an open banking solution like Yapily.

Instead of building direct connections to each bank, designing SCA flows from scratch, and managing compliance in-house, Yapily gives you:

• A single API for both AIS and PIS
• Prebuilt consent and authentication flows
• Hosted and white-label integration options
• Normalised data across thousands of banks
• Regulatory cover, so you don’t need your own licence

This lets you go live in a matter of weeks, not months or even years.

Open banking providers accelerate time to market by offering turnkey integration frameworks, ideal for businesses seeking rapid deployment.

FAQ

1. How long does it take to integrate open banking?

It depends on your approach. If you use an open banking platform like Yapily, you can get started in as little as 2–6 weeks. If you build everything in-house, including bank integrations, consent flows, and compliance, it will take much longer (often over a year).

2. Do I need a licence to use open banking?

Not always. If you use an open banking provider like Yapily, you can operate under their AISP/PISP licence. If you build in-house and want direct access to bank APIs, you’ll need to apply for your own regulatory approval.

3. What’s the difference between hosted and direct integration?

Hosted flows use prebuilt interfaces provided by the open banking platform to handle consent, bank selection, and authentication. This can be set up quickly.

Direct (or white-label) integration lets you embed the entire journey into your own app, giving you full control over the user experience while the platform handles the back end and compliance.

Some platforms, like Yapily, let you start with hosted flows and move to direct integration later.

The choice between hosted and direct integration depends on your team’s development resources and desired level of control over user experience.

4. What’s involved in building open banking in-house?

You’ll need to connect to each bank’s API individually, build and maintain SCA and consent flows, meet security and compliance standards, and normalise data formats across banks. It’s a significant investment in time and resources.

5. Can I access both data and payments through the same integration?

Yes. Platforms like Yapily offer a single API that supports both Account Information Services (AIS) and Payment Initiation Services (PIS), so you can build both use cases into your product without separate integrations.

This unified integration approach simplifies your product architecture while expanding the scope of open banking functionality you can offer.