UK open banking passes 1 billion payments

Open Banking Limited reported that more than 1 billion payments have been processed in the UK using open banking. The organisation also recorded 100 billion API requests and said average response time for payment requests has fallen to 349 milliseconds, a 50ms improvement.

The infrastructure behind these transactions dates to a 2017 Competition and Markets Authority order that required UK banks to provide application programming interfaces. Customers grant permission for their banking data to be shared via those APIs, enabling services such as payment initiation and account aggregation.

Open Banking Limited highlighted that the new milestones reflect growing adoption by businesses building services on the API framework. Firms use the APIs to initiate payments directly from customers’ bank accounts and to combine account information from multiple banks.

Research commissioned by Open Banking Limited and carried out by EY estimated the sector has already delivered about £8.2 billion in economic benefit. The analysis projects a further £7.4 billion a year within five years and suggests a potential increase to £43 billion a year if open banking reaches full maturity and adoption continues to rise.

Henk Van Hulle, chief executive of Open Banking Limited, described the figures as reinforcing the UK’s leadership in open banking and said the organisation will focus on strengthening resilience, performance and innovation to support wider adoption.

At a London event in February, former Worldpay chief executive Ron Kalifa warned the UK risked losing its lead, arguing regulators and firms had “laid the rail track, but hesitated to run the trains.” He said open finance, which would extend API data sharing to products such as mortgages and loans, “is still waiting to land” and pointed to faster progress in countries including Brazil and India.

Open Banking Limited and industry participants say further work is required to expand use cases, scale infrastructure and ensure systems remain robust as volumes grow. The organisation positioned the one billion payments and faster response times as steps toward broader data sharing across financial services.