Open banking remains a topic of high importance for governments and regulators alike across some of the leading financial ecosystems. While open APIs offer significant benefits, not all financial institutions have the technical capabilities to make the most out of them, and see regulatory compliance as a major roadblock.
Salt Edge, a financial API platform offering PSD2 and open banking solutions, aims to help businesses worldwide embrace the potential of open banking. Through connections to banks all over the world, Salt Edge enables its clients to offer account-to-account services, as well as account information services (AIS), and PSD2 compliance.
Garri Galanter, CEO of Salt Edge, sat down with Claire Woffenden, editor in chief at The Fintech Times, at Money20/20 Europe 2025 in Amsterdam, to discuss the company’s latest developments, regional differences in attitudes about open banking, as well as his predictions for the future.
Regulation: help or hindrance?
Across a range of sub-sectors in fintech and finance, many participants often argue that overly stringent and complex regulations harm innovation. But this is not always the case for open finance and open banking. Regulations like the EU’s PSD2 and the UK’s Open Banking standards require banks to open up customer account data to third-party providers, when requested.
Without these regulatory pushes, many traditional banks would have little incentive to share data with potential competitors. They also look to ensure regulatory clarity, clearly defining the rules and roles for market participants to ensure they and their consumers are kept safe.
However, Galanter argues that, particularly for smaller financial institutions, the regulatory outcome is closer to a lose-lose than a win-win.
“Financial institutions have to spend a lot of money to comply with the open banking regulations. In exchange, these institutions receive more competition from fintechs and other banks, which are then able to use their clients’ data.”
He explains that this setup means that FIs don’t always receive much payback from their initial financial outlay. Instead, the winner is the end consumer, Galanter says.
Create the future
With ‘Create the Future’ being one of Money20/20 Europe‘s key themes in 2025, Galanter also shared some insight into Salt Edge’s plans for the near future.
“We want to grow faster, and have plans to introduce new products to the market, alongside a new vision. This vision will not only be a provision of APIs, but also a provision of a systematic interchange of data between different APIs in a unified system,” he explained. “In the sphere of payment and data aggregation, we want to improve the usage of AI across the entire system of decision making dedicated to payments, crediting and trade finance”.
With some of these plans revolving around AI, Galanter stressed the importance of not relying on the technology for everything
“I don’t want to overestimate the AI, but this technology can significantly decrease the role of manual operations, specifically for credit monitoring, AML and other spheres. However, AI cannot replace the human vision.”
Looking more broadly to the future of the financial industry, the Salt Edge CEO shared his prediction for what the key drivers could be for global regulatory change: “We expect that the US administration will introduce first steps to ease regulation, which subsequently will impact regulations elsewhere across the globe.”
