Europe Open Finance

Salt Edge report: European open banking ecosystem in testing mode

Open banking leads the financial industry’s transformation for a new generation of services to appear. Salt Edge is positioned in the middle of this transformation by both building and consuming bank PSD2 APIs. We work hard on extending the bank coverage in Europe and beyond to help businesses expand and offer more customer-centered services.

Currently, Salt Edge offers connectivity to 5500+ banks in almost 70 countries worldwide, from which 2000+ are PSD2 APIs from across all Europe. By connecting to just one Salt Edge API, businesses are able to avoid wasting valuable resources on integrations with thousands of banks.

Nevertheless, the industry still faces the challenge to make sure that technical environments improve for the benefit of every player on the market. Advancing on our path to provide a pan-European open banking platform, we gained enough traction and insightful experience along the way to be sharing some of it for the benefit of the open banking community. Salt Edge has created a report on testing 2000+ PSD2 account information and payment initiation APIs in 31 countries against 39 criteria. We learnt that every EU country has a different open banking maturity, with the UK leading the way on many levels – API availability and API successful response rate, ease of bank integration, comprehensive documentation, and seamless flows.

Salt Edge open banking report: 2000+ APIs, 31 EU countries, 39 criteria

The results from across all Europe show that the open banking reality is far from ready. Interestingly, while Portugal banks register an API availability of 91%, in reality – only 57.6% of APIs requests were successfully responded to. It can be associated with the situation when almost half of the emails that come to the inbox are being ignored.

38% of banks have implemented their APIs without being in full compliance with the declared API standard (e.g. NextGen, Open Banking UK). For example, having many mismatches in parameter location, formats of data, field types, etc. and these differences are not being documented anywhere.

Though security should be the number one concern for banks, unfortunately, we identified banks that use custom certificates for API access, while eIDAS certificates are requested only during the onboarding process.

Many banks plan monetizing their APIs by building value-added offers, and for this to happen their APIs should work seamlessly, be reliable for communication, and have a user-friendly customer journey. We encourage TPPs and banks to work together towards creating a well-functioning environment, as only keeping a collaborative attitude from both sides will help go through the integration smoother and provide customers with the innovative open banking services.

Download the Report to discover what is the current state of open banking in Europe, which are the countries with the highest API availability, what are the biggest obstacles for the industry transformation, and much more.

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