The UK’s Open Banking ecosystem recently passed two significant milestones: more than one billion payments and 100 billion API calls across the CMA9 banks.
Those figures matter. Open Banking is no longer an experiment operating at the edges of financial services. The infrastructure works at scale, adoption is growing and the market is moving from proof of concept towards everyday use. In June 2026 alone, 99.5% of reported API calls were successful.
But a more important test still lies ahead: can all that data sharing make financial life meaningfully better for customers – and create measurable value for the organisations serving them?
For much of the past decade, Open Banking has understandably been defined by regulation, standards, APIs and consent. Considerable effort has gone into making secure data sharing possible. That work was essential. But infrastructure is not the same as impact, and an API call is not a customer outcome.
Early challenges around stability, response times, and outages created friction, but these issues have largely been addressed. Organisations are increasingly operating against more robust availability and performance standards, supported by the UK’s well-established Open Banking framework.
As integration challenges reduce, the industry is shifting its focus from architecture and compliance to outcomes, experience, and value creation. That shift reflects a more mature understanding of Open Banking’s real potential: not simply to enable data sharing, but to improve the products, services and decisions built around it.
Customers don’t care about Open Banking
Nobody wakes up in the morning hoping to grant a financial-data permission. People do care about what that permission enables though: receiving a responsible lending decision more quickly, understanding where their money is going, spotting the early signs of financial difficulty, avoiding unnecessary charges, or being protected from fraud.
Rich Mansell, senior director and sector lead banking and financial services, Concentrix
That distinction matters because the industry has sometimes treated data access as the destination, whereas in reality, it’s only the beginning.
If a lender can understand someone’s actual financial position without forcing them through a lengthy, repetitive application, that’s valuable. Similarly, if a bank can recognise that a customer may be struggling and offer appropriate help before they miss a payment, or if suspicious activity can be identified without legitimate payments being blocked, there is clearly value.
Customers don’t need to know that Open Banking is powering the experience. They just want the experience to work.
The missing layer is activation
Most financial organisations don’t have a shortage of data. The difficulty is turning it into something useful at the moment it can make a real difference.
An insight may exist inside a credit-risk system, but never reach the colleague speaking to the customer. A bank may recognise changing spending patterns, but continue sending the same generic communications. An affordability assessment may draw on richer information, while the application journey remains slow and repetitive.
In each case, the data exists. But the organisation simply cannot act on it effectively. This is why the next phase of Open Banking poses customer-experience and operating-model challenges as much as it does a technology challenge. It needs organisations to connect data, decision-making and customer journeys across different systems, channels and teams.
Imagine that permissioned transaction data shows up that a customer’s income has recently become less predictable. That insight could lead to a more appropriate affordability assessment. It could help a service colleague understand the customer’s circumstances without making them repeat everything. It might trigger an earlier, more supportive intervention if payments become difficult.
But all this only happens if the insight travels with the customer. Otherwise, Open Banking simply creates a more detailed picture – that no-one is in a position to use. This is a common challenge in legacy organisations, where fragmented data sets often sit across complex architectures, siloed brands, permission structures, and operating platforms.
Permission is not the same as trust
Trust is often discussed as though it is a prerequisite for data sharing: obtain informed consent, explain the purpose and protect the information.
All of that is obviously necessary. But trust is also shaped by what happens after the customer says yes. After all, trust is the sum total of what an organisation does with the permission it’s been given.
Was the benefit clear? Did the experience become easier? Was the resulting decision fair and understandable? Could the customer see how their information had been used? Did they remain in control?
If customers are repeatedly asked to share sensitive financial information without experiencing a meaningful benefit, consent just risks becoming another administrative hurdle. If data is used in ways they did not expect, trust can disappear quickly – however compliant the original permission journey may have been.
Financial institutions often misunderstand the delicate balance between transparency and intrusive marketing. When Open Banking verifies income for an SME but is then leveraged to target additional products, such as invoice financing or treasury services, customers may feel their data is being used outside the intended scope.
In personal finance, if a customer believes Open Banking is solely for verifying income for a credit application, discovering “higher risk” transactions like gambling could unexpectedly alter their pricing or risk profile. While these practices may be compliant, they can significantly diverge from customer expectations, ultimately undermining trust in the institution.
The strongest Open Banking experiences need to make the value visible for everyone. They need to explain, in everyday language, what information is being requested, why it’s useful and what the customer can expect in return. They should also make it easy to review or withdraw access.
AI can close the gap between insight and action
The growth of AI makes this conversation more urgent. Without the ability to turn shared data into useful action, Open Banking risks becoming little more than a sophisticated way of moving information around.
AI without reliable, permissioned data risks producing fast but flimsy decisions. Used together, however, they could fundamentally change how financial services support customers.
AI can analyse patterns that would be difficult to identify manually, provide colleagues with useful context during an interaction, and help organisations decide on the next most appropriate action. It could allow support to become more proactive, moving from responding to events after they happen – to recognising when a customer may need help.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA’s) July 2026 Mills Review(opens in new tab) describes a potential shift towards services that are increasingly delegated. It also stresses that greater autonomy brings with it a greater need for reliability, accountability and appropriate human oversight.
That balance is important, as the objective shouldn’t be personalisation at any cost, or automation for its own sake. It should be to make better decisions and provide better support, while ensuring that people can understand and challenge decisions – and reach a human being when judgement or empathy is required.
Measure the outcome, not the volume of data
To build a credible business case, organisations need to stop asking, “How can we use more Open Banking data?” and start with a customer or business problem.
That might mean reducing the time required to make a responsible lending decision, identifying and supporting financial vulnerability earlier, or making collections interventions better timed and less distressing.
Once the outcome is clear, the organisation can determine what data is needed, what decision it should inform, what action should follow and how success will be measured.
This might sound fairly straightforward, but it requires different teams to work backwards from the same outcome. Data and analytics teams cannot define success separately from customer-experience, operations, risk and product teams. The insight, the journey and the operational response all have to be designed together.
Everyday Loans, for example, used Open Banking to streamline its lending process, reducing the time needed for affordability checks and enabling faster decisions and a more transparent customer experience.
This is where the distinction between a technology supplier and a transformation partner becomes important – implementing the connection is only one part of the work. Value comes from redesigning the end-to-end journey around what the data now makes possible.
Open Finance will raise the stakes
The direction of travel is already clear. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 provides the government with powers to create new Smart Data schemes(opens in new tab), while the FCA’s Open Finance roadmap sets out a path from vision to delivery through to 2030.
As the ecosystem expands beyond payment accounts, organisations will be able to build a richer picture of customers’ financial circumstances. That could enable more joined-up guidance, better product recommendations, improved access to credit and more effective financial wellbeing support.
But access to more data won’t automatically create better outcomes. Without the ability to turn insight into appropriate action, Open Finance could simply multiply the complexity that organisations are already struggling to manage.
Financial institutions therefore should be using this period to develop the capabilities they’ll need for the next phase: connected customer journeys, clear ownership of outcomes, responsible AI, transparent value exchanges and operating models capable of acting on insight in real time.
The winners won’t necessarily be the organisations with the most data or the most impressive Open Banking platform. They’ll be the ones that make the customer outcome feel effortless.
Open Banking has done much of the hard work required to make financial data move. Its next challenge is to make that movement matter.
Rich Mansell is senior director and sector lead banking and financial services at Concentrix
Concentrix is an Event Partner of Open Banking Expo UK & Europe 2026, which takes place on 13-14 October at the Business Design Centre in London. Click here to find out more.
