If you’re searching for an alternative to Plaid, you might be looking for:

• A solution with broader coverage in Europe than Plaid currently offers. You want to be able to have one open banking partner that has the coverage you need.
• A completely customisable user journey and white-label API. You want to keep your branding at the forefront.
• More hands-on onboarding and ongoing support.

In this guide, we’ll run through four of the top Plaid alternatives for open banking, so you can find the right fit for your needs.

Prefer to talk to an expert about how open banking can help you? Book a call with one of our team.

Four alternatives to Plaid

1. Yapily: Europe’s leading open banking infrastructure platform

At Yapily, we connect with close to 2,000 banks and financial institutions across the UK and Europe. We help PSPs and other financial service businesses use open banking to initiate payments, access rich financial data, and offer innovative, data-driven products to your customers.

Rather than building apps at the product layer ourselves, we focus on developing infrastructure and tools, so that we can let our customers’ products take centre stage.

Here’s what you get when you choose Yapily:

Access extensive coverage across Europe for payments and data

One reason you might be looking for an alternative to Plaid is coverage. While Plaid is strong in the USA, it doesn’t have nearly the same extent of coverage in Europe.

If you’re looking to offer open banking services to your customers in more markets across Europe, you’ll want a provider with extensive coverage. Our infrastructure allows you to to nearly 2,000 banks and financial institutions across 19 countries, including key European markets such as the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. At the time of writing, we have 99% coverage in the UK and 85% average coverage across key European markets.

We also have connections with consumer, corporate, business, and wealth accounts. In fact, we’re the only vendor to have tested and fixed business account connectivity.

Thanks to our wide coverage, you only have to work with a single open banking provider. Plus, we have wide coverage at fair pricing for both payments and data:

Payments: You can use our A2A payment initiation service (PIS), sweeping or commercial VRP, and bulk payments.

Data: You can benefit from data enrichment, customer validation (such as KYC checks), and transaction data and categorisation.

Plus, Yapily Connect allows you to access open banking data and payments without having to get a licence as a third-party provider (TPP). This way, if you’re a fintech or lender, you can still access Europe’s open banking network with a licence as a PISP or AISP.

Use our white label infrastructure to allow your products to take centre stage

Most open banking platforms, including Plaid, highlight their brand throughout the end-user’s experience of open banking features and services. For instance, if a customer is paying on an ecommerce site, Plaid’s logo will appear throughout the payment journey. This can be offputting to your end-users, especially if you’re a startup.

At Yapily, we operate as an open banking infrastructure platform. So, as our infrastructure can be white label, your product—rather than our logo—can take centre stage.

This means that you can own the entire end-to-end payment experience. By maintaining your brand throughout, you can increase customer trust and boost conversion rates. Or if you’re using our data products for identity verification, you maintain full control and ownership over the user’s experience while our open banking API powers the data connection behind the scenes.

You can also use our hosted payment pages, if you don’t want to design and build your own ones. You’ll be able to add your own branding to those pages to maintain brand consistency.

Set up open banking quickly with Yapily’s support and enterprise-ready processes

Another reason to consider a Plaid competitor is to access more hands-on customer service and support processes. Whether you’re a financial services enterprise or a scaling financial technology company, you’ll want dedicated assistance with onboarding and compliance so you can get the most from your open banking infrastructure and launch relatively quickly.

At Yapily, we’re proud of our dedicated onboarding assistance and our responsive customer success team. They’re on hand to help you with API authentication, for instance. And they can help you register as an AISP or PISP with the relevant authorities in different regions, or register the institutions you want to work with through Yapily.

Plus, we’ll provide everything you need to work at scale. Other APIs can slow down your user experience if they receive too many transactions, but we’ve built our infrastructure to handle a large volume of data requests—so you can trust our platform at any volume.

*Reach out to us to hear more about Yapily’s technology.

How Yapily helps Juni support ecommerce businesses with financial data

Finance management as an ecommerce business can be challenging, particularly when you’re handling transactions from multiple bank accounts. Juni is a SaaS company that aims to solve this problem.

Juni uses open banking through Yapily to aggregate data from multiple bank accounts into one platform, giving e-commerce businesses a complete and accurate view of their finances.

Additionally, Juni helps ecommerce businesses scale by giving them access to “working capital” (i.e. credit) and rewards such as cashback. Again, it uses Yapily to offer this functionality, by gathering data on each business’s creditworthiness and streamlining the lending process.

Our role at Yapily is to provide Juni with high-quality integrations, broader coverage, and greater access to data, so that they can deliver more value to their customers. Thanks to Yapily, Juni can instantly and securely pull information from multiple accounts, giving their customers visibility over their finances in real-time.

Since partnering with Yapily, Juni has:

• Processed over £2 million in open banking payments
• Seen a huge uptake of their reporting product, with a 500% increase in open banking usage since March 2022
• Increased the number of high-value transactions
• Increased the account overview from 3 to 18 months, so customers can have greater visibility over their accounts—and Juni can make better-informed credit decisions.

*You can read the full Juni case study here: How Juni & Yapily support ecommerce businesses

Three more Plaid alternatives

1. TrueLayer

TrueLayer is an open banking platform that focuses on Europe. Like Yapily, it provides real-time bank payments and account information services across the continent and in the UK.

TrueLayer has coverage in 14 countries in Europe, however, it doesn’t operate in the US. In the markets in which it’s active, it claims 95% coverage.¹ It’s also an accredited data recipient in Australia.

The platform offers both payment initiation services and account information services. It’s stronger in payments, where it focuses on sweeping and non-sweeping variable recurring payments (VRP). When it comes to data, TrueLayer only enriches transaction data with two fields that aren’t returned by bank APIs.⁵

Journeys for the end user can be embedded in any app or site or hosted by TrueLayer.

2. Bud

Bud is a global platform that focuses on data intelligence. It helps organisations around the world turn bank transaction data into insights.

In terms of coverage, Bud is strong in the US and the UK. However, it only moved into the EU market in July 2024.⁶ While it’s growing, it’s not yet as strong across the continent as other open banking platforms. You can check which banks it connects to on Bud’s website.⁷

It describes itself as a “data intelligence platform”, and is much more focused on AIS compared to the likes of TrueLayer. It takes transactional data via APIs and categorises that data using machine learning and natural language processing, before supplying end users with aggregated insights into customer behaviour.

This focus does mean that Bud’s payment initiation services aren’t as strong for certain financial institutions or specific use cases. For instance, it doesn’t support VRP or bulk payments For both its data services and payment initiation, Bud can provide white label user experiences.

3. Stripe Connect

Stripe is one of the world’s largest payment service providers (PSPs), with nearly three million websites across the globe using Stripe to accept payments.⁸ Stripe Connect is its API for businesses that want to split customer payments between several other businesses.

Stripe Connect is not available in all the territories in which Stripe operates. Although it says the API is available in 100+ countries, it doesn’t share the depth of coverage in each region or the banks to which it connects.

Because Stripe Connect is still a PSP, its main strengths are in payment. Through its API, you can embed online payments into your apps and software solutions. However, it has very minimal data on customer transactions.

In terms of user interface, Stripe Connect offers what it calls a “cobranded” experience for end users. That means you won’t have full ownership over your user journeys.

Choose Yapily as your Plaid alternative

There are many alternatives to Plaid out there that offer open banking APIs, payment initiation services, and financial transaction data. Which you choose will depend on where you need coverage and whether you want data or payment services (or both).

Choose Yapily for extensive and deep coverage of payments and data. Contact us to discuss your needs with an open banking expert.

Sources

[1]https://support.truelayer.com/hc/en-us/articles/10973416170769-What-countries-is-TrueLayer-live-in

[2] https://www.thisisbud.com/blog/bud-expands-into-europe

[3] https://docs.stripe.com/connect

[4] https://plaid.com/en-gb/global/

[5]https://support.truelayer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008024978-What-data-enrichment-does-TrueLayer-perform-on-banking-data

[6] https://www.thisisbud.com/blog/bud-expands-into-europe

[7] https://www.thisisbud.com/market-coverage

[8] https://backlinko.com/stripe-users#how-many-websites-accept-stripe