Nearly a decade after Europe's second Payment Services Directive forced banks to open account data to licensed third parties, open banking API traffic is finally being driven by something other than compliance deadlines: revenue.
From compliance minimum to product surface
Early open banking APIs were built to satisfy regulators, not developers — rate-limited, narrow in scope, and frequently unreliable enough that fintechs kept scraping credentials as a backup. That's changed. A growing number of banks now treat their API layer as a product, with dedicated developer portals, service-level guarantees, and — increasingly — premium tiers that go well beyond the regulatory minimum.
The banks doing well here stopped thinking of open banking as a mandate to satisfy and started thinking of it as a channel to sell through.
Where the money is actually coming from
Three revenue paths have emerged. Premium data APIs — richer transaction categorization, income verification, cash-flow analytics — are being sold to lenders and account-opening platforms on a per-call basis. Payment initiation APIs are capturing a share of checkout volume that used to flow through card networks, particularly for larger transactions where interchange costs bite hardest. And a smaller but growing set of banks are charging fintech partners for premium reliability and support tiers on top of the free regulatory baseline.
What's still holding adoption back
Inconsistent standards across markets remain the biggest friction point — a fintech operating across five countries can still face five different API dialects, authentication flows and rate limits. Consolidation among API aggregators has papered over some of this, but at the cost of adding another intermediary (and margin) between banks and the fintechs building on top of them.
The direction of travel is clear, though: banks that once saw open banking purely as a cost center are increasingly building teams around it. Expect the API layer to keep becoming a bigger part of how banks compete, not just how they comply.