Although open banking continues to mature across Europe, regional discrepancies could slow progress; according to Yapily’s annual European open banking league table.
The data ranked the UK as the continent’s most mature open banking data, followed by Germany and Sweden.
The open banking infrastructure’s league table measured local regulatory oversight and enforcement against API performance and standardisation, digital readiness, domestic payments infrastructure and bank integrations, including the presence of third-party providers (TPPs), to rank 18 European countries on a 10-point scale to reveal the maturity of their open banking market.
The top three
With significant political support and a pro-innovation regulatory environment, open banking adoption has continued to skyrocket in the UK.
There are now six million active users in the UK with open banking payments growing 500 per cent YoY; according to the latest statistics from the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE).
The UK also boasts the highest number of registered third-party providers in Europe, helping to turbocharge the development of its open banking ecosystem.
Germany follows close behind in second place, aided by its strong regulatory supervision and usage of Berlin Group’s API standards; the most prescriptive after those adopted by the UK’s OBIE.
The country also makes the final with high payment conversion rates, maturity of local Bank API standards and rich coverage across all payment types scoring highly.
In third place, Sweden leads some impressive results for the Nordics in this year’s table, with regional regulatory regimes, highly developed digital infrastructures, and a collaborative approach to cross-border payments driving open banking maturity in the region.
Challenges on the horizon
Of the advancements identified in the table, it also discusses challenges to its adoption in equal measure, underlining how improved collaboration across the board is needed to ‘address a lack of standardisation and inconsistent levels of regulatory oversight and enforcement.’
Reflecting on the data, the company’s founder and CEO, Stefano Vaccino, comments how the industry is “on the brink of a financial revolution,” adding that further adoption will help to cultivate “better and more accessible financial services for everyone.”
Adding to this, the company’s director of public policy, Maria Palmieri, comments that despite the advancements, “discrepancies across EU member states could slow the rate of progress.”
“Although the European Commission has proposed to implement an open finance framework by 2024, member states that are still behind in open banking could face a number of interoperability challenges, exacerbating the fragmentation that already exists,” Palmieri comments.
“At the same time, the UK may have retained its position at the top of the leaderboard, but other markets are fast catching up. To stay there, the UK Government must act quickly and decisively to encourage further growth and innovation,” she added.
