Do any research about open banking and most of the information you’ll find will be about consumer current accounts. If you’re a PSP, fintech, or financial services business looking to offer end-users open banking for *business *accounts, you’ll find much less information available.

In reality, though, there’s no reason why business account users shouldn’t benefit from the same benefits of open banking as consumer accounts—deeper data, instant account-to-account payments, and improved user experience that open banking provides.

That’s why we want to dedicate this article to specifically showing you how open banking works for business accounts. It’s much the same as consumer banking. However, there tend to be fewer open banking providers that reliably connect to business accounts.

In this guide, we’ll also introduce you to Yapily, our open banking infrastructure platform. We’re one of the few solutions that offer fixed and tested business account connectivity.

In this article:

• What you can do with open banking for business accounts
• 4 features to look for in an open banking platform for business accounts
• Why choose Yapily as your open banking provider
• How Pleo uses Yapily for open banking with business accounts

Want to discuss your open banking needs with an expert? Reach out to us.

What you can do with open banking for business accounts

Open banking is the financial initiative that enables third parties to access financial data and initiate payments directly from bank accounts. It’s best known—and most often marketed—as a solution for customer accounts. But it works just the same for business accounts too.

That means open banking allows you to do the following:

1. Access transaction data, bank balances, and other account information from business accounts, via what are known as account information services (AIS).
2. Initiate account-to-account payments from business accounts, via payment initiation services (PIS).

While many open banking providers offer only either AIS or PIS, some platforms do both—albeit, they might specialise in one over the other.

Here’s the two main use cases for open banking for business accounts:

1. Access real-time transaction data from business accounts with AIS

Before open banking, it was extremely time-consuming and laborious to access real-time data from end-user bank accounts.

Typically, finance teams would need to do this manually, aggregating information from paper statements and using spreadsheets. Even then, the data would not be available in real time.

Now, with an open banking AIS provider that supports business accounts, you can easily get up-to-date information on end-user transactions and balances from their business bank accounts.

Let’s take an example. Say that you want to build a B2B solution that allows businesses to manage their various expenses in real time across all of their accounts. While previously this would have been practically impossible, open banking lets you seamlessly access that data via an API.

Using an open banking API, you can send requests for the specific financial information you need and the bank will return that data in real time. Then, with that data, you can offer a holistic view of balances, transactions, and other information in a single platform.

This is a product that the fintech, Juni, offers specifically to ecommerce businesses. Using Yapily Data (which you’ll hear more about below), Juni aggregates data from ecommerce company’s various accounts and gives them greater visibility of their finances.

You can find out more about how Juni works with Yapily in our case study: How Juni + Yapily are supporting ecommerce businesses through open banking

2. Initiate instant payments directly from your business accounts with PIS

Many businesses are still only using card payments such as Visa or Mastercard to make B2B payments.

These are familiar and well-trusted, but they have downsides. For instance, they charge high transaction fees and can take days for payments to be processed. The user also needs to enter their card details each time they make a payment.

Alternatively, businesses use standing orders or direct debits for recurring payments. However, these can be clunky and expensive, and it’s not easy to change the recurring amount.

Open banking overcomes these issues with instant account-to-account payments. With open banking payments, you can make low-cost bank transfers from one account to another via an authorised PIS provider (like Yapily). It’s also easy to initiate other kinds of payments, including:

• Variable recurring payments (VRP), which are like standing orders, but you can effortlessly change the sum of each recurring payment
• Bulk payments
• Scheduled payments

So, let’s again imagine a B2B solution that helps businesses manage their expenses. As part of that platform, you may also want to enable your customers to make payments from one of their accounts to another. With open banking, that’s easy and instant, as long as you have the right authorisation.

To give another example, Crezco uses open banking to offer a free payment platform for SMEs. With Yapily Payments, Crezco allows customers to instantly, securely, and affordably move money from one bank account to another. As a result, it’s helped customers save an average of £1,000 on fees for every 25 invoices.

*Read the case study: How Crezco + Yapily optimise payments for 5,000+ businesses

4 features to look for in an open banking platform for business accounts

When choosing among open banking solutions, it’s not always easy to appreciate their many differences. For one thing, some don’t support business accounts at all. Yet there are other nuances between them that can affect the kinds of services you can offer. Security goes without saying. The platform should adhere to Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) guidelines and comply with PSD2 regulations—ensuring robust Strong Customer Authentication (SCA**)** to protect users during transactions.

Here are some other key features to consider when you’re deciding on an open banking platform for you:

1. Business account connectivity. This will be the most obvious consideration. But lots of open banking providers don’t offer business account connectivity at all—supporting just consumer accounts instead.

   This is because, in many cases, banks use separate APIs for business and consumer accounts. That means open banking platforms themselves need a different Application Programming Interface (API) to support that connection.

   Even when they do support business accounts, though, open banking solutions may not adequately test that connection. Open banking platforms test their APIs by connecting to real bank accounts, but businesses are much less likely than consumers to allow their account to be used for testing.

   So, don’t just look for business account support—look for *well-tested *connectivity too.

2. Coverage. Coverage refers to the proportion of banking customers the platform can connect to in particular geographies. Different platforms tend to have strengths in different geographies, with some stronger in North America, for instance, and others strong in Europe. You’ll want to have high levels of coverage in the markets in which you operate.

   Most coverage rates you’ll see will be generalised for both consumer and business accounts. For instance, you’ll see a percentage like 80% coverage in a particular market—which is quite difficult to measure—or a total number of bank and financial institution connections, such as 1,500. It’s important to consider where the bank connections are. If an open banking solution has 3,000 connections, but all of them are in Germany, they might not be useful to you.

   If you’re looking for open banking for business accounts, double-check that these headline numbers include business accounts—and which specific banks it connects with.

3. Depth of data and types of payments. Whether you’re interested in an open banking platform for data or for payments, you’ll want to ensure that the solution provides the specific functions you need.

   For example, does the data platform offer transaction categorisation or data enrichment? Similarly, on the payment side, can it support VRP, bulk payments, or scheduled payments?

   In terms of data, be aware that the data that can be accessed will depend on the bank that the end user holds an account with. Some banks allow access to much more data than others.

4. User experience. Open banking has a big impact on your users’ experience of your app or platform.

   For instance, partnering with an open banking provider sometimes means that, during the payment journey, your users have to visit a page that’s overly branded with that provider’s own imagery. This can be disorientating for the user, because they may not recognise this brand, and that can cause them not to complete the payment.

   In fact, research from the Baynard Institute found that 25% of customers don’t trust websites with their credit card information, and thus abandon their carts. If your end-users see an unfamiliar brand during payments, this could be all that’s needed to ruin the customer experience enough for them to abandon the purchase.

   This is a particularly important consideration for business accounts. Generally, these tend to have lower conversion rates than consumer accounts anyway, because business accounts often require authorisation from multiple stakeholders before any transaction is processed.

   This added layer of authorisation, while necessary for compliance and oversight, can introduce friction to the payment process. Coupling this with poor branding at the point of payment could add even more friction, and reduce your conversions.

   To avoid this, it’s important to use a white label open banking solution. This way, you can customise the user experience of open banking to match your branding, and inspire trust in your end-users.

Why choose Yapily as your open banking provider

At Yapily, we’re an open banking infrastructure platform with authorisation as both an AIS and a PIS provider.

Here are three reasons why you should work with Yapily.

1. You’ll get extensive, rigorously tested coverage for business accounts across Europe

We mentioned that coverage for business accounts will be one of your most important considerations when selecting a provider. However, it’s often difficult to understand which banks a provider actually has coverage with.

At Yapily, we have some of the best coverage in Europe, for both data and payments. We cover nearly 2,000 banks across 19 countries, including key markets such as the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the UK.

We offer business account connectivity with banks in major European countries, including:

• Germany: Volksbanken, Sparkassen, Deutschebank, Postbank
• UK: AIB, HSBC, Santander, Natwest, Barclays, Lloyds
• NL: ING, Rabobank, ABN Amro

We also rigorously test our connections with bank’s open banking APIs using real business, corporate, wealth, and consumer accounts. That means you can trust our account connections so that you can scale reliably.

2. You can access a wealth of data and use a range of payment types

The value of an open banking provider depends on the data it provides and the payment options it offers. If it doesn’t offer the kinds of data or payment you need, it’s not worth the investment.

At Yapily, we’re authorised as both an AIS and PIS. We can support you with both payment and data services, and you won’t need to get authorised yourself.

We provide deep, real-time data on bank balances, transactions, and more. With Yapily Data, you can quickly perform know your customer (KYC) checks or collect transaction information. And you can take this further with Yapily Data Plus, which offers transaction categorisation and data enrichment.

When it comes to payments, our Yapily Payments product provides a full range of payment types, including single immediate payments, scheduled payments, bulk payments, VRP (sweeping) and commercial VRP.

Are you a lender working with SMEs? This blog is for you: Introducing Data Plus: Elevate Your SME Lending Decisions

3. You can customise your user interface to match your brand

Many open banking providers only offer a payment flow that’s branded with their own imagery. As we’ve mentioned, this can be disorientating for your end users, and it means that your own brand is not front of mind when they’re making payment.

At Yapily, we offer flexible solutions so that you can customise your payment flow in the way that suits you. We have white-label solutions that you can adapt entirely to your brand. It’s fully customisable and can be integrated with any application.

However, if you don’t want to build your user interface yourself, you can use our hosted solutions.

How Pleo uses Yapily for open banking with business accounts

Pleo, a B2B expense management platform, is revolutionising how companies manage spending and access credit.

Previously, topping up the Pleo wallet was a manual, time-consuming process that caused delays and cash flow issues. Now, with Yapily’s open banking integration, Pleo has significantly improved this system.

Using Yapily’s open banking solution, finance teams can now instantly fund their accounts through direct, automated payments—no manual data entry required. For businesses, this means real-time payments that reduce administrative tasks, eliminate errors from manual input, and speed up everyday financial management. .

As Pleo expanded into European markets like France and the Netherlands, Yapily’s powerful API and extensive banking network made scaling easier. Within just a few months, Yapily’s infrastructure enabled €7.3 million in wallet top-ups across the UK, France, and the Netherlands.

Through its partnership with Yapily, Pleo offers businesses a seamless solution that lets them focus on growth and development.

*Read the full case study: How Pleo & Yapily are changing businesses spend management

Deploy open banking for business accounts with Yapily

Open banking can transform the way users make payments and access banking data from business accounts. But, to benefit, you’ll need to work with an open banking platform that has business account connectivity.

At Yapily, we’re one of the few open banking solutions that offers exactly that. Get in touch with us to find out more.