Until recently, screen scraping was the default method for accessing financial data from customer bank accounts, especially for account information services (AIS). It worked by using a computer programme to extract what a user sees on their online banking screen. While this method enabled early fintech innovation, it also came with downsides: fragility, poor user experience, and a growing number of legal and data protection concerns—particularly when used without explicit consent.
Today, there’s a more modern alternative: open banking APIs. These provide secure, real-time access to financial data, with user consent baked into the process. For fintechs and lenders, open banking offers a better way to verify income, run affordability checks, and access account-level data—all with fewer compliance headaches.
Whether you’re actively using screen scraping or just exploring your options, this guide will help you decide the right approach for your business.
We’ll cover:
- Open banking vs screen scraping: Key features compared
- How does screen scraping work?
- How does open banking work?
- How to make the most of open banking with Yapily
- How Emma uses Yapily’s open banking infrastructure for account aggregation
Want to see in detail what open banking can do for you? Reach out to speak to an expert.
Open banking vs screen scraping: Key features compared
| Features | Open Banking | Screen Scraping |
|---|---|---|
| Data provided | Access to real-time customer data via direct API connections with bank accounts. Typically includes: account holder name, bank name, balance, 90 days of transactions, and more—delivered in real time. Some providers offer data enrichment for deeper insights. |
Gathers data from a UI. Scrapers must be rerun for updates. Can pull any visible on-screen data, making it flexible—but lacks enrichment or structured formatting. |
| User experience | Quick, secure authorisation via user’s banking portal with SCA. After consent, data is retrieved instantly and securely—fully handled by the open banking provider. | Users must provide login credentials to third parties. Tools then log in, scrape data, and log out—often triggering distrust and drop-offs. |
| Security | Regulated providers comply with strict standards. Includes: SCA via the bank app, encrypted APIs, no credential sharing, and user-controlled access revocation. |
Requires sharing bank credentials with third parties, which may store them in plain text. Raises serious compliance and security risks, with unclear consent handling. |
| Reliability | High. Most APIs have minimal downtime and are built to handle scale. UK APIs, for example, report 99.93% availability (source). | Fragile. Breaks when bank website layouts change. Scrapers often need manual updates, leading to frequent outages and poor user experience. |
| Coverage (supported banks) | Expanding global coverage. Regulation drives adoption, but many banks now build APIs voluntarily due to customer demand and ecosystem benefits. | Near-universal coverage. Can access any b |
How does screen scraping work?
Screen scraping involves using a computer programme to collect the data that customers usually see on their screens.
It can be used in all manner of digital applications—not just bank accounts and financial data. In the context of finance, though, screen scraping is a long-standing method for collecting banking data at scale.
Here’s how it works:
- User credential sharing: The user provides their banking login credentials to a fintech, bank, or third-party provider (TPP) that requests access to their financial data.
- Automated login: The TPP uses a screen-scraping tool designed to log into the user’s online banking portal, mimicking a real user.
- Data extraction: Once logged in, the program navigates the interface and retrieves visible financial data, such as transaction history, account balances, and account holder details.
- Data download: The extracted data is collected and formatted for use by the TPP, enabling financial insights, payment processing, or other services.
The scraping tool gathers a snapshot of the data at any given moment. This can be useful for quick customer verification checks, but if a TPP wants to access real-time data, the tool needs to continually rescrape the website for the most up-to-date information. This is not always an instant process, as scraping large amounts of data can be slow, particularly if websites are using JavaScript.
Once the tool has access to the user interface, it can gather the relevant data and initiate payment from one account to another.
Screen scraping: Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Wide coverage Screen scraping tools can access data from virtually any bank with an online portal—regardless of geography or API availability. No need for bank participation or regulatory alignment. |
Legal and compliance risks Scraping may capture data the user didn’t explicitly consent to share, creating serious data protection and regulatory issues. |
| Lower conversion rates due to trust barriers Users must input banking credentials into third-party platforms—often causing drop-off due to lack of trust. |
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| Lack of user control Scraping collects all visible data, meaning users can’t choose what to share—damaging trust and violating informed consent principles. |
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| Fragile technology that breaks easily Scrapers rely on exact website layouts. Any change can break the flow, causing errors, outages, and frustration. |
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| No real-time access to data Data is only refreshed when re-scraped. This delays insights and weakens reliability for time-sensitive decisions. |
How does open banking work?
While screen scraping relies on the bank’s user interface to access customer data, open banking works entirely behind the scenes. It gives TPPs access to customer data by directly connecting them with bank accounts.
Open banking works by using APIs. If a bank or financial institution supports open banking, it will have an API that allows the sharing of data from bank accounts to the TPP, with the account holder’s permission. The TPP then works with an open banking platform that can connect them to those APIs so they have access to the data at any time, as long as the account holder consents.
TPPs can then request the specific data that they need via the API. All the end user has to do is approve the TPP’s request via their own bank’s porta or appl. This happens in the same way they would initiate a payment. If the open banking platform is authorised as a payment initiation services provider (PISP), you can leverage its API to make instant pay by bank payments too.
Open banking gives the account holder and the TPP much more control and flexibility over what kinds of data and payment services they use.
Open banking: Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Reliable, real-time data and instant payments Open banking APIs provide live access to transactions, balances, and other financial data—ideal for affordability checks, credit decisions, or account aggregation. With a payment initiation provider, you can also process instant account-to-account payments. |
Limited global coverage Open banking is expanding, but it is not yet available in all countries. Regulatory frameworks vary by region, requiring businesses to adapt to different standards across markets. |
| Granular data access and stronger user control Only specific data is shared. Users authenticate via secure banking portals—never sharing login credentials. Improves trust and reduces the risk of unauthorised data sharing. |
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| Secure, regulated authentication Uses Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), including two-factor or biometric methods, ensuring a secure and compliant user experience. |
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| Standardised data across banks Unlike screen scraping, open banking delivers data in a consistent, structured format across all banks—making integration easier. |
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| Supports enriched insights Open banking providers can categorise transactions and provide deeper behavioural and affordability insights. |
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How to make the most of open banking with Yapily
Yapily is an open banking infrastructure platform that offers a faster and more reliable alternative to screen scraping.
With our API, we make it easy for financial service companies (in open banking terms, third-party providers) of all sizes to access user’s financial data, securely, in a standardised form, and with a streamlined user experience. As a PISP, we can also support you to initiate payments directly from user accounts.
We’re not like other open banking solutions that provide basic data and payment services. Instead, we’re an open banking infrastructure platform, meaning we enable you to build custom branded UX and UI flows for your merchants—rather than rely on a cut-and-paste interface.
Here are three reasons why you should work with Yapily:
1. Access a range of payment and data services
Open banking platforms can be authorised as a PISP, which can initiate payment, and/or an account information service provider (AISP), which offers data services.
While most open banking platforms are either one or the other, Yapily is both. This means you can use a single solution for both gathering data and initiating payment—rather than having to pay for two separate providers. Even if you don’t need to offer both right now, it’s worth having that option to support you as you scale.
Different open banking platforms offer different payment features and data services depending on whether they focus on certain industries or use cases. At Yapily, we offer:
- Pay by Bank—single and scheduled payments.
- Bulk payments, which allow you to process multiple payments in a single transaction*
- Sweeping variable recurring payment (VRP), which enables automated transfers between accounts of the same owner*
UK only
You can also use Yapily Data Plus for transaction categorisation and enrichment. Our enrichment engine helps you make better sense of transactions, thanks to 90+ outgoing and incoming transaction types.
With our range of products, Yapily can support a broad range of data and payment needs. And you can trust our service to be flexible, reliable, and scalable to match your ambitions.
2. Grow confidently across Europe
One of the most important considerations when choosing an open banking platform is coverage. This is the number or proportion of banks that a particular platform connects with in your target region. Working with a platform with only limited coverage means that you may not be able to support merchants who want to grow in given geographies.
Yapily has some of the most extensive coverage in Europe and the UK. We connect with around 2,000 banks and financial institutions in 19 countries—including in key markets such as the Netherlands, Germany, and France.
This reliable coverage means that you and your merchants can scale with ease wherever you and they want to work in Europe.
Plus, we’re one of the few platforms that has tested and optimised connectivity with business, wealth, and consumer accounts. It means we can support you and your merchants in Europe, regardless of whether they’re B2B or B2C.
3. Leverage robust infrastructure with our white-label solution or hosted pages
One particular area where open banking is superior to screen scraping is the user experience.
With screen scraping, users can feel vulnerable to security issues, as they have to share their login credentials with the TPP or screen scraping tool. Meanwhile, with constant crawls being processed on the bank’s website, it can slow down the experience for everyone.
However, when choosing an open banking platform, make sure that it supports the kind of experience you want to offer. Some open banking platforms aren’t very flexible, only offering prebuilt payment flows which often include their own logos and pre-built branding.
At Yapilywe provide the API and can support your business in building its own applications at the product layer. That’s why we offer two kinds of product:
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White label solutions. These allow you and your merchants to build your UX from scratch, so you can serve your end users in the way that works best for them. There will be no Yapily logo included throughout the user flow at all.
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Hosted pages. Our pre-built pages let you get started immediately with open banking so you can access all the benefits of open banking while you build your ideal UX.
You might choose to start with our hosted pages so you can offer Pay by Bank straight away, while you’re building a custom solution in the background.
How Emma uses Yapily’s open banking infrastructure for account aggregation
Emma is a personal finance management app that allows users to track their spending—and make instant transfers—between their various accounts. The company’s priority was to offer a simple user experience, alongside all the data that its users need.
Rather than screen scraping, Emma chose open banking. Now, thanks to Emma’s partnership with Yapily, its users can visualise all their live transaction data in a single app. Plus, they can make instant fund transfers, top up their Emma Invest account and pay their contacts—all in a single screen.
What’s more, they can do this completely securely. There’s no need for users to share their bank details, or for Emma to constantly crawl banking apps.
As a result of partnering with Yapily, Emma has seen:
- 30,000 users sign up to Emma Invest in a single month
- A 267% month-on-month increase in transaction value
- Increased their total payment consents by more than four times.
Want to find out more? Read the full case study: How Emma & Yapily are helping people make smarter financial decisions
Meet your users’ data and payment needs through open banking with Yapily
In this guide, we’ve compared screen scraping and open banking. Each has its benefits. For instance, while screen scraping can be used anywhere across the world, open banking provides a superior experience for users, merchants, and financial institutions in regions where it’s supported.
If you opt for open banking, choose Yapily. We support a full range of open banking payments and data services in Europe—and we provide a customisable white label infrastructure to flexibly meet your needs.
Want to find out more? Book a demo to speak to an open banking expert.