For consumers using cryptocurrency platforms, business spend management tools, or personal finance apps, topping up accounts from a bank is a common but often clunky process.
Traditionally, users must navigate tedious steps—manually entering sort codes and account numbers or setting up multiple beneficiaries. Payments can take hours—sometimes days—to process, delaying access to funds and limiting usability.
But there’s a better way: open banking. By enabling direct account-to-account payments, open banking transforms the top-up process. It eliminates manual input, reduces wait times, and offers a smoother, more user-friendly experience.
In this guide, we’ll explore how open banking is revolutionising wallet top-ups, highlight real-world use cases, and show how Yapily is paving the way for businesses to adopt this game-changing technology.
We cover:
- What is open banking and how can it impact wallet top ups?
- 3 use cases for instant top ups with open banking
- Why use Yapily for open banking wallet top ups?
- How Yapily supports Pleo in offering wallet top ups
Interested in speaking with an expert about open banking? Get in touch with us.
What is open banking and how can it impact wallet top ups?
Open banking allows authorised third parties to access financial data and make payments through a bank’s secure API.
Say you’re a fintech and you’re building a personal finance app that lets consumers see all their balances and transaction information in one place. Open banking lets you access that data from their various banks in real-time using an open banking API. It also lets you initiate payment instantly—with the account holder’s permission, of course.
So, what does open banking mean for wallet top ups? Rather than end users having to enter their bank account details into your app, then wait for payment to be processed, open banking offers an instant top up experience:
- A customer opens your app and chooses to “pay by bank” (rather than by debit card) and enters the amount they want to top up.
- They select their bank from a list.
- They’re then instantly redirected to their banking app or portal, where they can authenticate themselves and give consent.
- Then, open banking processes the payment and the funds are available for instant use.
Overall, digital wallet top ups with open banking promise swift transactions and a frictionless experience. Plus, alongside the instant payment process itself, open banking can also offer you deeper insights into your customers’ financial behaviour through account information services.
Three use cases for instant top ups with open banking
The user experience of the top up process is more or less the same across any type of app or wallet using open banking. But to understand how open banking can work for you, let’s look at some specific use cases in detail.
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Spend management tools. Account top ups have traditionally been affected by delayed balance updates, which meant business users often couldn’t make their own payments on time. And, as there were many intermediaries involved in the transaction, users had concerns about complexity and security.
With open banking, spend management platforms can streamline the top up process and set up reminders to ensure they’re always topped up. What’s more, open banking lets these platforms more easily access their clients’ financial data in real time too.
Want to see this in action? At Yapily, we worked with Pleo, who grew their customers month on month thanks to open banking. You can read more about our partnership below.
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Cryptocurrency platforms. Crypto is a volatile market. So, if users need to wait for their debit card to be validated and then their payment to settle (which can take up to two days), they can miss out on valuable trades.
Open banking makes this problem a thing of the past. Instant top ups remove wait times—and liquidity concerns—while reducing the fees users need to pay.
“Yapily’s open banking platform works behind the scenes, allowing us to offer a frictionless payments experience,” says Szymon Sypniewicz, CEO of web3 startup, Ramp Network. “Our partners are seeing increased conversions now that buying crypto is simple, instant and secure.”
Find out more about how open banking works in crypto.
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Personal finance apps. Just like business spend management platforms, personal finance apps using traditional top ups have suffered from slow payments and a lack of transparency.
As you’ve seen in other use cases, open banking solves these problems by streamlining the entire top up process. It means that customers can now access the funds they need as soon as they make their payment.
One personal finance app we’ve helped at Yapily is Emma. Thanks to our open banking infrastructure, Emma has been able to launch Emma Invest, helping its users get more from their money via instant top up payments. As a result, the app has benefited from a 267% month-on-month increase in monthly transaction value.
Why use Yapily for open banking wallet top ups?
At Yapily, we’re an open banking infrastructure platform that enables fintechs, payment services providers (PSPs), and other financial institutions to offer more streamlined payments and data services.
In the rest of this guide, we want to share how Yapily can support you to offer instant wallet top ups. Plus, we’ll show you how our infrastructure stands out among open banking providers.
1. You’ll get extensive coverage across Europe, as well as comprehensive account connections
Whether you’re a B2B spend management platform or a crypto app, there’s a good chance that your customers will be international—if not now, then in the future. As a result, you’ll need an open banking platform that supports connections with your customers’ banks, no matter where they’re located.
At Yapily, we have among the most extensive coverage in Europe—for both payments and data—of any open banking platform. We cover 19 countries across Europe, including key markets including the UK, France, Netherlands, and Germany.
We connect with nearly 2,000 bank connections across the UK and EU.
While coverage is a critical consideration when choosing an open banking solution, it’s also important to look for the kinds of accounts the solution can connect with. If you’re a B2B platform, for instance, it’s no good if the solution can’t connect with business or corporate accounts.
At Yapily, we connect with consumer, business, and wealth accounts, and we’re one of the few solutions out there with fixed business account connectivity. Our payment initiation service also supports variable recurring payments (VRP), bulk payments, and scheduled payments.
2. You’ll offer a streamlined, trustworthy experience thanks to in-app integrations
Some of the common concerns with conventional top ups are about trust and security. If customers are forced to enter too many details—or they’re taken to a site they don’t recognise—this can put them off. And that can mean they’ll abandon the payment entirely.
The same is true for some open banking platforms. Some solutions only offer a payment flow that’s external to your application and that’s branded with that solution’s own imagery. If customers don’t recognise your open banking provider’s brand—which it’s likely they won’t—they might lose trust too.
At Yapily, we provide a flexible payment experience that can be fully integrated into your app. It ensures that you can keep your customers within an environment that they recognise, to improve the rate of conversion.
That said, if you want to get started quickly, we can also build and host solutions for you—so that you don’t need to develop your user interface from scratch.
3. You’ll be able to scale without constraint thanks to our robust API
At Yapily, we’re always rigorously testing our API to handle the needs of enterprises. We test our API using real customer accounts—both consumer and business accounts—to ensure that it can support the scale of requests.
As a result, we’re trusted by large enterprises to provide a reliable service with minimal downtime.
We also provide support for enterprises that are looking to enter new markets. For instance, we’ll support you to meet your regulatory requirements and test to ensure your integrations and systems are set up correctly. And because we operate as a third party provider (TPP), you can use our PISP and AISP services without having to get authorised yourself: in both the UK and across Europe.
Ready to see how Yapily can transform your wallet top ups? Book a call with our experts
How Yapily supports Pleo in offering wallet top-ups
Pleo is a B2B expenses management platform that’s offering a new way for companies to visualise their spending and access credit.
Previously, topping up the Pleo wallet was a manual and time-intensive task, leading to delays and cash flow challenges for businesses. But now, thanks to Yapily’s open banking integration, Pleo has transformed this process.
With Yapily’s open banking solution, finance teams can instantly fund their accounts through direct, automated payments. For businesses, these real-time payments lighten the administrative workload, remove errors associated with manual entry, and accelerate routine financial activities.
As Pleo expanded into European markets such as France and the Netherlands, Yapily’s reliable API and extensive banking network simplified how they scaled. In just a few months, Yapily’s infrastructure facilitated €7.3 million in wallet top-ups across the UK, Netherlands, and France.
Through its partnership with Yapily, Pleo provides businesses with a streamlined solution that allows them to concentrate on growth and development.
Read the full case study: How Pleo & Yapily are changing businesses spend management
Work with Yapily for your open banking wallet top-ups
Open banking has the potential to transform industries like cryptocurrency and spend management. As businesses look to provide a better customer experience, platforms like Yapily offer a compelling blend of convenience, security, and adaptability.
If there ever was a time for businesses to consider open banking, it is now. Speak to our expert team for a chat on how we can help your business today.
