Open banking and its superset open finance is a global movement that enables the
secure sharing of financial data to enable new, seamless customer experiences, create
innovative products and services, increase collaboration between banks and fintechs,
and radically transform the way bank clients interact with their finances. With open
banking, the traditional way of accessing data from financial institutions via screen
scraping and the exchange of client credentials with aggregators is being replaced with
secure, industry-standard API connections. Financial institutions benefit from it through enhanced access to customer data, security and transparency in data sharing, and the ability to serve clients in new and innovative ways, which leads to higher value for clients and new sources of revenue.
Key jurisdictions are introducing new open finance regulations, or are updating existing ones. In the US, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has finalized its Section 1033 rulemaking of the Dodd-Frank Act, making it a regulatory requirement for financial institutions to offer open finance APIs starting early 2026. In the European Union, the PSD3 regulation is expected to be finalized by late 2024, with an anticipated implementation timeline of 20263. The UK’s Open Banking Limited (OBL) has published version 4.0 of its Open Banking standard with updates the security profiles, support for for ISO 20022, and improved information flows. Open Finance Brasil, one of the most rapidly evolving standards, has recently been updated with new rules for Pix payments. In the MENA region, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is leading the charge with updates to its KSA standards and a push for frictionless bank-to-bank payments by 2030. And in Australia, the CDR regulation continues to expand beyond finance, integrating data that includes energy and non- bank lending, as well as an ambitious plan to include action initiation such as payments and account switching.
Our latest whitepaper evaluates 17 global open banking and open finance platforms that provide services to financial institutions. The objective of this research is to inform business and technology leaders at financial institutions of the options that are available to them, in order to help accelerate their process of selecting the right platform partners for their organization. This whitepaper focuses on the functional, technical, compliance and strategic aspects of each vendor. It excludes pricing information due to confidentiality and custom options.
Open Finance and Open Banking Platforms
We’ve evaluated platforms in five geographical regions of interest and operations:
Globally focused platforms: Plaid, Mastercard (Finicity), Yodlee, Axway, Sensedia, Ozone API, Tink (Visa), SaltEdge.
North American platforms: MX, Akoya, Symcor.
Latin American platforms: Belvo, Prometeo.
European platforms: Qwist, Yapily.
Asia and Middle East platforms: Brankas, Tarabut.
Categorization
The platforms were classified by their capabilities: data in, data out, and platform capabilities which consist of open finance standards covered and use cases supported out of the box.
All Rounders: Support both data in and data out capabilities, although often stronger in one of the two. Available compliance solutions for one or more global open finance standards. Strong support for out of the box use cases.
API Specialists: Strong support for data out, enabling compliance in one or more global standards. Strong support for use cases out of the box and API capabilities that allow extending the platform for additional use cases.
Access Specialists: Strong capabilities for data ingestion and aggregation, often with enrichment capabilities. These enable data recipients to build innovative capabilities and use cases.
Regional Specialists: Focused on a handful of key regional standards and enabling financial institutions in their own region with compliance in accordance with local regulations.
Summary of Findings
● The basic building blocks that every open finance platform must have to meet compliance requirements are: developer portal, identity management, authentication & authorization, API management, consent management, and reporting & analytics.
● There are two directions for data flow that open finance platforms enable: data in and data out. Data in refers to ingesting an account holder’s financial data from other financial institutions. Data out refers to permissioned sharing of data from your financial institution with others. Not all open finance platforms support the flow of data in both directions. Further, there are differences in the data types and fields that each platform supports on top of what’s required by regulation.
● There are three options for financial institutions to implement open finance:
1. Build an open finance platform. This includes building APIs and sourcing or developing all components required by the platform. This approach provides the greatest control but requires the highest financial and human capital investment. [RP1]
2. Partner with an open finance platform. This approach greatly accelerates time to market, reduces complexity and risk, leverages the vendor’s expertise, proven compliance capabilities and pre-built use cases. The trade-off is lower control over use cases and customer experience.
3. Engage with core banking or technology provider to utilize their APIs. This provides compliance with the fastest time to market and a lower financial investment, but comes at the cost of limited control over capabilities, use cases, monetization options and customization.
● Some open finance platforms cover standards and data for multiple regions, while others specialize in their specific region and its corresponding use cases. When choosing a provider, financial institutions must ensure fit with their regional regulatory requirements, desired use cases that support their strategy, client needs, and technology roadmaps.
● Meeting compliance requirements is a basic necessity, but on its own is not sufficient for an organization to fully benefit from open finance. In order to differentiate and grow, financial institutions must implement use cases that create innovative customer experiences, utilize data for actionable insights, and provide premium value-add services.
*We have conducted our analysis and classification of open finance platforms using the Altitude Open Finance Quadrant™, a derivative of the Gartner Magic Quadrant framework. Altitude Consulting is not affiliated with Gartner.