If you’re looking for an open banking solution, it’s likely you’re looking for either:

• Payment initiation services (PIS), so you can make payments directly from one bank account to another.
• Account information services (AIS), so you can access real-time data on consumers’ financial information and behavior.

Open banking solutions is the umbrella term for both types of services. Compared to conventional banking infrastructure, open banking can save money in transaction fees and give you a deeper insight into your end users’ financial data.

In this post, we share 5 open banking solutions that offer either PIS or AIS services (or both), to help you make the best choice for you.

In this article:

• What should you consider when choosing an open banking solution?
• 5 top open banking solutions
  • Yapily
  • Plaid
  • Token
  • Tink
  • TrueLayer

Want to speak to an open banking expert about your needs? Book a call with us.

What should you consider when choosing an open banking solution?

One of the major factors you’ll want to consider when selecting an open banking solution is whether you need PIS (payment) or AIS (data) services. This will depend on the types of product or service you offer—whether you want to offer data services, enable payment, or both. Critically, though, not every open banking platform is licensed as both an AIS and a PIS provider.

It’s also important to ask yourself the following questions:

• Where are you operating?

One of the main differentiators between open banking platforms is coverage. This refers to the proportion of banks and financial institutions that a platform connects with in each market. While a platform may be strong in the UK, it may be less so in Europe, affecting the customers you can serve.

So, wherever you’re looking to offer your products, it’s important to make sure that the open banking platform has the coverage you need. Typically, it’s a good idea to aim for at least 85% coverage in each market.

• What kinds of data and payment services do you want to offer?

Do you want to be able to access data from business accounts, rather than just personal accounts? Do you want to make recurring payments, not just one-off payments? Are you interested in seeing enriched data?

Different open banking platforms support different kinds of services, so it’s important to check which one offers what you need. If you intend to scale in future, it can make sense to choose a provider that offers the widest range of features, so you don’t need to change providers.

Keep reading for our comparison table on common open banking features.

• What volume of transactions and data requests are you expecting?

Open banking solutions use APIs to access data and initiate payments between banks. The API is the interface that makes this possible.

Yet APIs differ in functionality. Some open banking APIs can be affected by a lot of downtime, for instance, if they require a lot of maintenance. Similarly, some aren’t built to handle high volumes of requests, which can mean they slow down or crash if there are a large number of transactions.

If you’re a large organisation, or you handle large volumes of transactions, it’s important to choose an open banking platform with an enterprise-ready API.

• What kind of user interface (UI) do you want to offer your users?

A final key differentiator between platforms is the UI they offer. Many platforms only offer hosted pages, meaning that when your user makes a payment, they’ll enter a space with that platform’s branding. This is quick to set up but won’t be as personalised as your own branded page.

The other option (if the platform supports it) is a white-label solution, where you customise your payment journey to match your branding. However, this will often mean that you have to build that UI from scratch yourself.

You’ll need to ensure that the platform you choose can fully support your use cases—whether you need open banking payment solutions, data services, or both.

To help you find the right solution for you, here are 5 of the top open banking solutions to choose from.

5 top open banking solutions

1. Yapily

At Yapily, we offer an open banking solution that helps payment service providers (PSPs) and other financial services access consumer data, initiate payments, and provide innovative products to their customers. We provide both AIS and PIS services to support you in all your open banking needs.

Unlike other solutions, we focus on building the infrastructure of open banking. This way, you can focus on improving your product while we handle the back-end open banking processes.

One thing that really sets Yapily apart is our independence. We’re not here to compete with our customers. Unlike some other providers, we don’t target the same market as our clients, so there’s no risk of conflicting interests. This gives PSPs and fintechs the confidence to grow their businesses knowing their open banking provider is fully aligned with their goals.

With Yapily, you’ll be able to do the following:

Access extensive coverage for payments and data without needing authorisation

As we mentioned above, one of the most important strengths you want in an open banking platform is coverage. The higher the rate of coverage, the more customers you can serve in a wider range of markets.

At Yapily, we have extensive coverage for both payments and data, so that you can access account information and initiate payment with the single open banking solution. We can connect you with nearly 2,000 banks and financial institutions in 19 markets across Europe, including key markets such as the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.

Note: coverage doesn’t always guarantee availability, as it depends on local infrastructure.

Aside from extensive coverage, we also offer deeper connections with banks and financial institutions than most other platforms. With Yapily, you can connect with consumer, corporate, and wealth accounts, and we’re one of the only solutions with fixed business account connectivity.

We’re authorised both in the UK and EU as a PIS provider (PISP) and AIS provider (AISP), so you don’t have to get your own licence to access open banking services. This saves you a complex and often expensive process that typically requires you to have internal expertise on your team.

Benefit from a full range of data and payment services, including commercial VRP

Different open banking platforms offer different kinds of payment and data services. This determines the kind of products and services that you can offer to your end users.

In terms of payments, we support bulk payments and variable recurring payments (VRP), a process that allows regular transactions of varying sums of money from one account to another. Imagine it like Direct Debit, but where it’s easy to change the amount charged.

Plus, we’re one of the only providers of commercial VRP (cVRP) in the UK, which allows variable payments to be made recurrently between different parties.

Commercial VRP is at the cutting-edge of payments. It allows merchants to collect recurring variable payments from customers without asking for their bank details. This saves time and improves the experience for end users—who don’t need to set up a new Direct Debit when they amend a sum—while saving money for merchants.

Read more about the benefits of commercial VRP.

When it comes to data services, we offer data enrichment, including transaction categorisation, so you have the fullest picture possible of your end users’ transactions, including what they’re spending money on. Plus, with Yapily Validate, you can access data for KYC checks and customer validation to ensure compliance.

Offer a frictionless white-label experience with our secure API

One of the priorities for PSPs and other financial service brands is that their chosen open banking provider can support the scale of requests that they and their customers need. That’s why, at Yapily, we’ve built our open banking solution specifically for enterprise customers who have high demands on their API.

While we serve all kinds of financial institutions, we’re attuned to the needs of larger clients in particular. Our API is secure and scalable, with industry-leading uptimes and low latency. It’s also ISO270001 certified.

During onboarding, we perform rigorous testing to make sure all integrations and systems are set up correctly. Plus, as an enterprise, you benefit from Yapily’s secure API, designed to support your regulatory requirements, while still maintaining control over your internal compliance processes.

We also offer white-label open banking infrastructure so that you have control over your entire user journey. Or if you’re looking to get started as soon as possible, we also offer hosted user flows too. You can use our UI templates, or work with our experts for additional support.

How Yapily empowers Emma’s customers to access financial data and make account-to-account payments

Emma is a personal finance management app that lets users budget more effectively by offering consumers better insights and visibility into their financial transaction data. They use our open banking platform for both payment and data services.

The app uses Yapily’s open banking solution to aggregate transaction data and balances from customers’ different bank accounts. This provides a much simpler user experience and means that customers don’t have to continually flick between multiple apps to understand their finances.

What’s more, using Yapily Payments, Emma lets its customers make payments between its different accounts more quickly and easily too. And they can use the Emma app to invest via open banking too, to help them make better financial decisions.

Three months after working with Yapily, Emma enabled 30,000+ people to start investing. The app also benefited from a 267% month-on-month increase in monthly transaction value.

Read the full case study: How Emma + Yapily are helping people make smarter financial decisions

2. Plaid

Plaid is an open banking solution that’s focused largely on the US market. While it also serves Europe, coverage in this market is lower.

Like Yapily, Plaid is both an AISP and a PISP and so offers both open banking data and payment services. In terms of data, it has some data enrichment features, including transaction categorisation. However, it does lack some key payment features, such as bulk payments.

Unlike other open banking solutions on this list, Plaid doesn’t have white-label user flows. It only offers a branded UI, via its hosted solution.

3. Token

Token is an open banking solution that’s focused on Europe. Overall, it aims for 80% coverage in the 20 markets in which it operates.

Token is focused on payments rather than data. For instance, it doesn’t offer any data enrichment, which may be a limitation if data quality is your priority. While it does support both bulk and recurring payments, it has no commercial VRP.

Like Yapily, Token offers both hosted and white-label products, so that you can choose between custom or pre-built flows.

4. Tink

Tink is an open banking solution that was acquired by Visa in 2022.⁵ Like Yapily and Token, it’s focused on Europe and has 95% coverage in major European markets.

As both an AISP and PISP, Tink can offer both data and payment services. At the time of writing, Tink doesn’t offer commercial VRP.

Tink offers a hosted payment platform and a white-label option (available at an additional cost).

Read more: Tink alternatives: 6 open banking platforms compared

5. TrueLayer

With no coverage in the US at all, TrueLayer is another open banking solution focused on Europe.

TrueLayer offers both AIS and PIS, allowing it to support you in both payment initiation and data services. However, it only enriches data with two fields and doesn’t offer commercial VRP. Plus, data is only available as an add-on if you use the PIS service.

Like others in this list, TrueLayer has both white-label infrastructure and hosted user flows, to give you additional flexibility.

• Discover more: 5 TrueLayer alternatives for open banking

Unlock the power of open banking with Yapily payments and data

In this post, we share what you need to know when choosing an open banking solution, including the key factors to consider when selecting a platform.

If you’re looking for an enterprise-ready platform with extensive UK and European coverage and industry-leading payment features, look no further than Yapily.

Contact us to find out how we can help your business grow.

Sources:

¹https://plaid.com/en-gb/
²https://token.io/
³https://tink.com
⁴https://truelayer.com/
⁵https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/44051/visa-launches-open-banking-with-tink-in-the-us