I still remember 2016 clearly. I was still at a large Nordic bank, and a small but growing group of us were excitedly investigating Open Banking’s opportunities. We were convinced we were standing at the beginning of a revolution and a technology shift. That we would finally see the overnight batches and end-of-day files replaced by real-time APIs. Regulators were telling the industry to open up. Fintechs were hungry to build. Banks were in the middle.
Ten years on, I think it’s worth asking honestly: did Open Banking deliver on that promise?
My answer is: Partially. More value has been built than most people outside the industry realize. But we also got a lot wrong, and the most exciting chapter is only now beginning.
The Promise We Made
When the EU’s PSD2 directive came into force in January 2016, the narrative was sweeping. Open Banking would democratize financial data, break the stranglehold of incumbent banks, supercharge competition, and ultimately put consumers in charge of their own financial information. Third-party providers would build services that banks never could, or would. A thousand flowers would bloom. Banks would be eaten as breakfast as a fintech builder put it.
It was a compelling vision. And it wasn’t wrong. It was just, as it turned out, extremely optimistic about the timeline and the banks willingness to comply.
What Actually Happened
The first years were marked by fragmentation that, frankly, no one had fully anticipated. PSD2 mandated that banks open up, but it did not mandate *how*. Some banks followed the Berlin Group standard. Others invented their own. The result was a patchwork of hundreds of different implementations across Europe, each with its own quirks. For a fintech trying to build on top of this infrastructure, it was like being handed a key to a building where every door has a different lock, and half of them are broken on purpose.
I say “on purpose” deliberately. Some banks, to their credit, genuinely tried to build good APIs. But others did the absolute regulatory minimum, and then some. I even had a banker with the title “Head of Open Banking” tell me, straight-faced, that they had built their APIs as difficult as possible on purpose. It became an industry joke that the “fallback mechanism”, was more reliable than the official API itself.
Adoption by end users was slower than expected, too. But perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised us. Think about location data: most people wouldn’t dream of sharing their whereabouts with an app until they experienced the value of it firsthand, whether that’s getting turn-by-turn directions or finding the closest and best sushi place. Financial data is no different. You have to experience the benefit before you’re willing to hand over access. And for the first few years, the conversation was almost entirely focused on PFM, personal finance management apps, Credit scoring and payments, specifically as a checkout option in e-commerce. Those were the flagship use cases, and they were real. But they were also very narrow.
It took another couple of years before the B2B world woke up to what was possible. Gradually, the conversation shifted. ERPs and accounting platforms started exploring automatic transaction feeds. Lenders began looking at real-time cash flow data for credit decisions. Treasury teams started thinking about covenant monitoring and liquidity management in ways that didn’t require someone to manually download a file at the end of the day. The same infrastructure that let a consumer see all their bank accounts in one app turned out to be enormously valuable for a CFO trying to get a real-time overview of their company’s financial position.
That shift, from consumer PFM to B2B financial infrastructure, was arguably the most important development of the decade. It wasn’t in the original PSD2 narrative. It emerged from practitioners who looked at the technology and asked: what else can this do? And from regulators who put their foot down and explicitly included the B2B segment, making clear that Open Banking was never meant to be just a consumer story.
Last chance: Get your tickets for Baltic Fintech Days May 13
What Did Work, And Matters More Than People Acknowledge
Here’s what I think gets underappreciated in the “Open Banking has failed” takes that surface periodically: a genuine infrastructure was built.
In the Nordics especially, we built something remarkable. Use cases we dreamed about in 2016 are now standard practice. SME lenders like Froda and QRED use real-time cash flow data to make credit decisions in minutes rather than weeks. Accounting software like Accountor, Bokio and Bolageriet is automatically categorizing and reconciling transactions. KYC processes are being streamlined with verified financial data. Fraud prevention is getting smarter.
And we have learned, collectively, what works and what doesn’t. We know which business models work and which don’t survive contact with reality. We know how to talk to banks, how to work with regulators, and how to explain Open Banking to a CFO who has never heard the term before. And perhaps most tellingly: an entire industry today actually knows what an API is, and what value it can deliver. That cultural shift, from blank stares to genuine business fluency, shouldn’t be underestimated.
The Turning Points: AI + PSR Changes Everything
I’ve been in Open Banking for about ten years and I have never been more optimistic about what comes next than today. Not because I’m an optimist, but because I see two concrete forces accelerating the change simultaneously.
The first is AI
The open banking infrastructure we spent a decade building is, at its core, a data access infrastructure. And AI is hungry for exactly this kind of structured, real-time, permissions-based financial data. When you combine AI with access to a user’s actual transaction history, you get something genuinely powerful: a financial advisor that knows you, a credit model that actually reflects reality, a fraud detection system that spots patterns no human analyst could see.
We’re already seeing this in practice. Clients are using open banking data to train and feed AI models for credit scoring, cash flow forecasting, and personalized product recommendations at a pace that was unimaginable five years ago. 76% of banks now anticipate Open Banking usage to grow by more than 50% within the next year. The AI-in-banking market is projected to reach $45.6 billion in 2026, up from $26.2 billion just two years ago.
This is not hype. The cadence of actual production deployments is genuinely accelerating. When I speak with customers today, lenders, loyalty providers, accounting platforms, financial wellness apps, they are creating a production pilot in two days, then moving from pilot to production faster than at any point in the last decade. The combination of better AI tooling and a now-mature Open Banking API layer has unlocked a new tier of value. And it helps to understand why, if you think about how the ecosystem is actually structured. First, the banks built and opened their APIs. Then aggregators like Enable Banking built the connectivity infrastructure on top, normalizing and standardizing access across thousands of banks. On top of that, product building companies create the actual end products and services. And finally, the customer gets to use something that just works, without ever needing to know what’s running underneath. Each layer depends on the one below it being solid. After ten years, that foundation is finally strong enough to build on at scale.
The second force will be PSR
On 27 November 2025, after years of negotiation, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU reached a provisional political agreement on the Payment Services Regulation (PSR), the successor to PSD2 and a fundamental rewrite of the open banking regulatory framework. PSR addresses many of the structural problems that plagued the first decade directly.
API performance standards become clearer and more enforceable. The unnecessary friction that banks introduced, re-authentication barriers, poorly documented interfaces, intentional degradation, is being targeted explicitly. Open Banking obligations shift from vague mandates to specific, enforceable requirements with teeth, sharp teeth.
This matters enormously. The infrastructure we built under PSD2 was built on a regulatory foundation with significant gaps. PSR is designed to close those gaps. Combined with the broader Open Finance ambitions embodied in FiDA (the Financial Data Access framework), we are finally building the regulatory architecture that matches the original vision of 2016.
Last chance: Get your tickets for Baltic Fintech Days May 13
What the Next Ten Years Look Like
I don’t think the next decade will look like the last one, slow, fragmented, incrementally better.
I think it will be discontinuous. The combination of mature infrastructure, AI capabilities, and stronger regulation creates the conditions for rapid adoption curves rather than linear ones. Services that took years to reach scale can today reach it in months. Use cases we haven’t invented yet will emerge from the combination of data access and AI reasoning in ways that are still hard to predict.
A few things I’m confident about. Open Banking will become invisible. The best version of this technology is one consumers never think about. It just works, silently, making their financial lives better.
The Nordics will remain at the front. We built early, we built well, and we have the institutional knowledge, the regulatory relationships, and the developer ecosystem to move quickly. And perhaps just as importantly, we have a culture that creates trust in technical solutions. In a region where people genuinely trust digital infrastructure, adopting new financial technology isn’t a leap of faith, it’s a natural next step.
And as AI moves from answering questions to taking actions on users’ behalf, access to verified, real-time financial data becomes essential. Open Banking infrastructure will be the connective tissue of the AI-powered financial system. The generation born in the 2000s is already exporting all their transactions directly into ChatGPT to get a grip on their finances. They don’t think twice about it. For them, sharing financial data with an AI is as natural as sharing location data to get a cab or find a restaurant. That behavioral shift alone should be a wake-up call for anyone still debating whether Open Banking has a future.
At the same time Perplexity AI is launching a full integration with Plaid in the US. For the same to happen in Europe is just a matter of time. Then not only the younger generation will be using this.
The Honest Verdict
Ten years of Open Banking: we built the foundation, proved the use cases, and learned hard lessons about what good infrastructure requires. We didn’t transform the industry overnight, and the fragmentation of the early years was a real cost, to fintechs, to consumers, to investors and arguably also to the banks themselves.
But the work was not in vain. And the moment when it pays off fully? I believe we’re in it now. I already see the acceleration with my own eyes: new players building AI-native products on top of Open Banking infrastructure at a pace we’ve never seen before, entirely new verticals discovering what Open Banking can do for them, and far more consumers who actually understand and see the value of sharing their financial data. The flywheel is finally spinning.
The revolution was never cancelled. It was just on a longer runway than we thought.
