Open Banking Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis | Last updated: July 25, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Open banking processed 137 billion API calls globally in 2025. The United Kingdom reached 16.5 million user connections by December 2025, with 351 million open banking payments that year — a 57% jump on 2024. Brazil recorded 128 million active consents in January 2026, making it the world’s most engaged open finance ecosystem by consent volume. The global open banking market was valued at $35.72 billion in 2025 and is on track to exceed $43 billion in 2026.
Quick Answer: How Big Is Open Banking in 2026?
According to Axis Intelligence Research’s analysis of primary data from Open Banking Limited, Juniper Research, Precedence Research, and Banco Central do Brasil: the global open banking market reached $35.72 billion in 2025, supported by 183 million users worldwide and 137 billion API calls. The UK leads on regulatory maturity and payment volume; Brazil leads on consent scale; the US is navigating a regulatory stall after the CFPB’s Section 1033 rule was stayed in August 2025. According to Axis Intelligence Research’s Open Banking Country Readiness Index (OBCRI), the UK (87.2) and Brazil (86.8) are effectively tied at the top of the global readiness table — the tightest leader gap the index has recorded at baseline.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research’s analysis of Open Banking Limited’s 2025 annual review, UK open banking processed 351 million payments in 2025 — a 57% year-on-year increase — while API calls reached 24 billion (+27% on 2024) and user connections hit 16.5 million by December, up from 12.1 million a year earlier.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research’s review of data published by Sensedia and Banco Central do Brasil, Brazil’s Open Finance ecosystem recorded 128 million active consents in January 2026, generating over 4.4 billion weekly API communications — making Brazil the highest-consent open banking system on the planet by a factor of nearly 8× over the UK’s user connection count.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Open Banking Country Readiness Index (OBCRI) — a composite of regulatory maturity (35%), user adoption (35%), API infrastructure (20%), and market growth trajectory (10%) — places the UK first at 87.2 and Brazil second at 86.8, with the European Union third at 73.3 — a margin so narrow it reflects genuine structural parity between two very different architectural approaches.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research’s review of the CFPB’s August 2025 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the US Section 1033 open banking rule — finalized in October 2024 — was effectively stayed as of August 2025, with CFPB initiating reconsideration under new leadership; larger institutions’ April 2026 compliance deadline has been placed on hold, leaving the US market in a regulatory holding pattern while market-led aggregators (Plaid, MX, Finicity) continue operating under legacy screen-scraping infrastructure.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research’s analysis of Juniper Research data (April 2025), global open banking users will reach 645 million by 2029, up from 183 million in 2025 — a 252% increase driven primarily by growth in underwriting and digital identity use cases rather than consumer payments alone.
What Is Open Banking? (Working Definition for This Dataset)
Open banking is a regulated framework that requires financial institutions to share customer financial data with authorized third-party providers (TPPs) via standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), subject to explicit customer consent. It is distinct from general digital banking: a customer using a mobile app to check their balance is using digital banking. A customer authorizing a budgeting app to read their transaction history via a bank API is using open banking.
The regulatory implementations differ by jurisdiction in three key ways: mandatory participation (UK, Brazil, EU) versus market-led (US pre-2024), data scope (account information only versus full open finance), and governance model (single standard-setter versus fragmented).
This article uses the term “open banking” to cover both narrow open banking (accounts and payments) and broader open finance frameworks (insurance, pensions, investments) where countries have moved to that scope — Brazil being the primary example.
How Many People Use Open Banking Globally?
According to Juniper Research’s Global Open Banking study published April 29, 2025, total open banking users globally reached 183 million in 2025 and are projected to exceed 645 million by 2029 — a 252% increase over four years. Juniper identifies underwriting and digital identity verification as the two highest-growth use cases, both of which are institutional rather than consumer-initiated.
The 183 million figure aggregates across markets with incompatible measurement standards: the UK counts “user connections” (not deduplicated across brands), Brazil counts active consents, and the US has no standardized reporting framework. Juniper’s estimate is a modeled aggregate, not a direct count. Axis Intelligence Research treats it as the most cited directional benchmark while noting that market-by-market primary data (below) carries more methodological precision.
UK: Volume, Growth, and the VRP Inflection
The United Kingdom is the world’s most data-rich open banking market — the only jurisdiction where a single standards body (Open Banking Limited, reporting to the FCA and PSR) publishes verified monthly management information across the nine largest banks.
According to Open Banking Limited’s 2025 annual review, published January 29, 2026 (authored by OBL Data Scientist Anton Joachim, covering full-year CMA9 MI data):
- 351 million payments were processed via open banking in 2025, a 57% year-on-year increase
- 24 billion API calls were made in 2025, up 27% on 2024
- User connections reached 16.5 million by December 2025, up from 12.1 million in December 2024 — a 36% increase
- Sweeping Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) grew 98% year-on-year, nearly doubling
- Single domestic payments grew 52%
- Weighted API availability remained above 99.50% every month in 2025
- Average API response times improved to 324ms — the fastest recorded
According to the OBL Impact Report 7 (March 2025 data, published 2026), the milestone position as of March 2025:
- 13.3 million active open banking users (individuals and small businesses), up 40% on the prior year
- 31 million open banking payments in March 2025 alone — equivalent to 7.9% of all Faster Payments in that month
- Variable Recurring Payments accounted for 13% of total open banking payments
- 145 live third-party providers with active market propositions
- 1 in 5 UK consumers and businesses actively using open banking
According to the FCA’s February 2026 open banking progress report, open banking in the UK is growing rapidly with more than 16 million users now benefiting from the service. The FCA report confirmed the formation of UKPI (UK Payments Initiative) — a new company formed by 31 firms — to enable commercial VRPs beyond the CMA9 banks.
According to Open Banking Limited’s September 2025 press release, the UK hit 15.16 million user connections in July 2025 — described as marking the fastest growth on record and reaching nearly one in three UK adults.
Sarah Davis:
The VRP figure is the one that matters for the next cycle. Variable Recurring Payments grew 98% in 2025 and now account for 13% of all open banking payment volume. That is a structural shift, not a blip. VRPs are to open banking what direct debit was to traditional banking: the mechanism that converts one-time permission into durable commercial relationship. Every utility, subscription, and gym membership is a potential VRP candidate. The fact that they’re growing at nearly 100% while single payments grow at 52% tells you where the commercial model is heading — and it’s not toward one-time pay-by-bank transactions at checkout.
Brazil: The Consent-Scale Leader
Brazil’s Open Finance system — overseen by the Banco Central do Brasil and launched under Resolução Conjunta BCB/CMN Nº 1/2020 in four phases starting February 2021 — has achieved consent volumes no other jurisdiction has approached.
According to reporting from Sensedia published by TI Inside (January 22, 2026), Brazil’s Open Finance ecosystem recorded 128 million active consents in January 2026, with infrastructure generating over 4.4 billion weekly API communications between institutions. Consent growth reached 44% year-on-year from January 2024 to January 2025 (43 million to 62 million consents), and the pace accelerated further into 2026.
Several structural factors explain Brazil’s lead. First, mandatory participation: all regulated financial institutions above defined thresholds must join — there is no opt-out. Second, the reciprocity rule: institutions must share data if they wish to consume it, which prevents the data asymmetry seen in market-led systems. Third, the Pix integration: Brazil’s instant payment system, launched November 2020 by the BCB, processed over 6 billion transactions monthly as of December 2024 and set a single-day record of 252.1 million transactions on December 20, 2024. The integration of Pix with Open Finance created a flywheel — digital payment infrastructure and data-sharing infrastructure reinforce each other in a way that no other market has yet replicated.
The number that contextualizes Brazil’s scale: the UK’s 16.5 million user connections (December 2025) is dwarfed by Brazil’s 128 million consents — even adjusting for population differences (UK: ~67 million people, Brazil: ~215 million), Brazil’s per-capita consent rate is materially higher.
Sarah Davis:
Brazil built something the UK hasn’t: a system where the infrastructure is neutral. Pix is owned by the central bank. The Open Finance framework is owned by the central bank. No single commercial participant controls the rails. In the UK, the CMA9 compliance structure keeps open banking infrastructure quality highly variable across nine large banks, each with different API performance. In Brazil, the BCB sets the technical standard centrally and enforces it. The result is 128 million consents in a country where only a decade ago half the population was unbanked. That is not incremental progress. That is a systemic reordering.
The US: Regulatory Stall and Market Reality
The United States entered 2026 in the most ambiguous position of any major economy on open banking.
On October 22, 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized its Section 1033 rule on personal financial data rights, requiring financial institutions to make consumer account data available to third parties at consumer request, at no cost. The rule was published in the Federal Register on November 18, 2024 (89 Fed. Reg. 90,838). A legal challenge was filed the same day the rule was issued — by Forcht Bank, the Kentucky Bankers Association, and the Bank Policy Institute.
On August 22, 2025, the CFPB — under new leadership — published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking signaling reconsideration of the rule. The April 2026 compliance deadline for the largest institutions was placed on hold. As of July 2026, the rule’s fate remains contested. The Federal Register docket (2025-16139) is the primary source.
The US market did not stand still in the absence of a federal mandate. According to market data reported across multiple sources, the US operates the world’s most commercially developed private open banking infrastructure:
- Plaid connects to 12,000+ financial institutions and serves as the primary data aggregator for thousands of fintech applications
- MX serves US credit unions and regional banks with a competing aggregation layer
- Finicity (Mastercard) provides open banking APIs across the US market
- The US mortgage and lending sector is already deeply dependent on open banking for income verification and account verification
The US market’s position is unusual: high commercial adoption, low regulatory standardization. Screen-scraping — where aggregators log in with consumer credentials rather than using bank-granted API access — remains widely used. The CFPB’s Section 1033 rule, if eventually implemented, would mandate a transition to API-only access. Its indefinite delay preserves a fragmented market where data quality and security standards vary by institution.
Sarah Davis:
The Section 1033 litigation is the wrong lens for understanding the US open banking market. The commercial market — Plaid, MX, Finicity — was already functioning before the rule existed. What the rule would have done is force standardization and kill screen-scraping, which is simultaneously more secure (no consumer credential sharing) and more expensive (banks have to build and maintain APIs). The industry’s resistance to the rule is partly about cost and partly about competitive advantage: large banks with sophisticated API infrastructure would benefit from a screen-scraping ban; smaller banks would struggle. The lawsuit is really a fight about who bears the infrastructure cost.
The EU: Mandatory Framework, Variable Execution
The European Union’s PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2), effective September 2019, created the regulatory foundation for open banking across all member states: banks are required to provide open APIs, and licensed third-party providers can access customer data with consent.
The EU’s position in the OBCRI (73.3) reflects a structural tension: strong regulatory mandate, inconsistent implementation. A 2023 EBA review found that API quality varied significantly across member states — some national implementations met the spirit of PSD2, others provided minimum technical compliance that hampered TPP access in practice.
PSD3 — the next iteration — was proposed by the European Commission in June 2023 and remained in legislative process as of mid-2026. PSD3 is expected to strengthen API performance standards and extend open banking to additional data types. The European Open Finance framework, being developed in parallel through the Financial Data Access (FIDA) regulation, would extend sharing to insurance, investments, and pensions — following the path Brazil has already walked.
Notable EU market-specific developments:
Germany: Strong account aggregation market (Finanzguru, Banksalad), but cultural resistance to data sharing and a strong cash tradition have kept payment initiation volumes low compared to the UK.
Netherlands: Among the highest EU open banking API adoption rates, consistent with its broader digital infrastructure leadership (95.6% internet banking penetration per Eurostat 2025).
France and Germany: According to Juniper Research’s A2A payments analysis, A2A payment use is lower in France and Germany than in other European markets — Wero (the European Payments Initiative’s A2A solution) is being positioned to address this.
Poland: Blik, Poland’s bank-led instant payment system, has captured approximately 70% of local e-commerce payments — demonstrating that real-time A2A scale is achievable through bank consortium rather than open banking regulation alone.
Australia: CDR Expansion and the Adoption Gap
Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR), launched in banking in 2020 and administered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, is the most carefully architected open banking system in the Asia-Pacific region.
According to ACCC’s July 2026 media release, more than 1.3 million Australians are currently using the CDR, representing approximately 135% year-on-year growth. The non-bank lenders sector joined CDR in July 2026, with consumer data sharing commencing November 9, 2026, per the ACCC’s official rollout page.
The CDR’s OBCRI score (61.1) reflects a gap that Australian regulators themselves acknowledge: the system is technically well-designed but adoption remains low relative to its ambition. The official CDR dashboard figure of 1.2–1.3 million active users against a population of 26 million adults is a penetration rate below 5%. A Lateral Economics projection cited at the Open Banking Expo (May 2026) forecasts 18 million users by 2035 — which implies the current adoption rate must accelerate dramatically.
A key diagnosis: screen-scraping remains “easier” than CDR-compliant API integration for some use cases, as the ACCC’s own commissioner Ian Oppermann acknowledged publicly at the May 2026 Open Banking Expo. The CDR’s high security and compliance standards — which make it genuinely superior for consumers — also create friction for smaller providers trying to participate.
Sarah Davis:
Australia built the right architecture and then discovered the market didn’t reward the architecture. The CDR is technically more secure and more privacy-protective than any market-led aggregation system. The problem is that “technically better” doesn’t move consumers or fintechs if the alternative — screen-scraping — is faster to integrate and good enough for most use cases. The 1.3 million adoption figure after six years is not a failure of regulation. It’s a reminder that infrastructure value isn’t realized until the use cases built on it are more compelling than the workaround. Australia is at that inflection; the non-bank lending expansion in 2026 may be the use case that forces the transition.
What Is the Open Banking Country Readiness Index (OBCRI)?
Standard country comparisons of open banking use a single metric — usually user count or API call volume — which systematically misrepresents markets at different maturity stages. A country with 10 million users and a mandatory regulatory framework is categorically different from one with 10 million users and no regulation. Volume alone conflates them.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Open Banking Country Readiness Index (OBCRI) is a composite index designed to capture the structural readiness of a market to deliver open banking at population scale — across regulatory architecture, adoption, infrastructure, and growth trajectory.
OBCRI Formula and Inputs
OBCRI = (Regulatory_Maturity × 0.35) + (User_Adoption × 0.35) + (API_Infrastructure × 0.20) + (Market_Growth_Trajectory × 0.10)
Weight rationale:
- Regulatory Maturity (35%): Scores mandatory participation requirements, enforcement mechanisms, standards body quality, and scope of covered institutions. Sources: OBL/FCA (UK), BCB (Brazil), EBA (EU), ACCC (Australia), CFPB (US), MAS (Singapore), SAMA (Saudi Arabia), CBN (Nigeria), CNBV (Mexico).
- User Adoption (35%): Scores active user / consent count as a share of addressable adult population, adjusted for measurement methodology. Sources: OBL MI data 2025, BCB Open Finance dashboard, ACCC CDR dashboard, Juniper Research market estimates.
- API Infrastructure (20%): Scores weighted API availability, response times, standardization, and TPP ecosystem breadth. Source: OBL MI (UK), EBA review reports (EU), ACCC CDR technical performance (Australia), market reports for other jurisdictions.
- Market Growth Trajectory (10%): Scores year-on-year growth rate of payments, consents, or API calls (whichever is the primary metric for the jurisdiction). Sources: OBL, BCB, Juniper Research, ACCC.
Baseline reading: July 2026. This is the first OBCRI computation. Comparative statements within the table are valid at this date; statements about historical change require a prior computation. All inputs are directional assessments based on available primary data; scores for markets without OBL-equivalent public MI (most markets) carry higher uncertainty.
Limitations: The OBCRI combines metrics from jurisdictions with incompatible measurement frameworks, reporting frequencies, and governance models. Regulatory Maturity is partially a qualitative assessment. User Adoption scoring for non-UK/Brazil markets relies on estimates with wide ranges. Axis Intelligence Research will refine inputs as comparable primary data becomes available. The index should be read as a directional ranking, not a precise measurement.
OBCRI Rankings (Baseline, July 2026)
| Rank | Market | Reg. Maturity | User Adoption | API Infra | Growth | OBCRI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United Kingdom | 95 | 80 | 92 | 75 | 87.2 |
| 2 | Brazil | 90 | 85 | 85 | 85 | 86.8 |
| 3 | European Union | 85 | 60 | 78 | 70 | 73.3 |
| 4 | Singapore | 78 | 55 | 80 | 70 | 69.5 |
| 5 | India | 75 | 55 | 70 | 90 | 68.5 |
| 6 | Australia | 80 | 35 | 72 | 65 | 61.1 |
| 7 | Saudi Arabia | 72 | 40 | 68 | 82 | 61.0 |
| 8 | United States | 60 | 50 | 65 | 60 | 57.5 |
| 9 | Nigeria | 60 | 38 | 60 | 80 | 54.3 |
| 10 | Mexico | 55 | 30 | 55 | 75 | 48.2 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research OBCRI v1.0, July 25, 2026. Input sources: OBL MI 2025, FCA, BCB, ACCC, CFPB, MAS, SAMA, CBN, CNBV, Juniper Research, EBA, national regulatory publications.
Sarah Davis:
The US sitting eighth — below Australia, Singapore, and India — is the result that will generate the most pushback. The objection is that the US is the largest open banking market by commercial revenue, and Plaid alone connects to 12,000 institutions. Both true. But OBCRI measures readiness to deliver open banking at population scale under a consistent framework — not revenue generated by commercial aggregators operating in a regulatory vacuum. Brazil’s 128 million consents under a single national framework, with mandatory participation and a central bank as the standard-setter, is a more structurally advanced system than the US market-led stack, regardless of which generates more venture capital. The US scores well on infrastructure (65) and adoption (50) but poorly on regulatory maturity (60) precisely because its most advanced infrastructure is private, non-standardized, and depends on security practices that the CFPB’s stayed rule was specifically designed to eliminate.
How Large Is the Open Banking Market?
Multiple market research firms have sized the global open banking market for 2025. Their figures vary by methodology, scope, and what they define as “open banking revenue.”
| Source | 2024 Value | 2025 Value | CAGR | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grand View Research | $31.61B | — | 27.6% | Through 2030; forecasts $135B |
| Precedence Research | — | $35.72B | 21.0% | Through 2035; forecasts $240B |
| Fortune Business Insights | — | $35.30B | 20.8% | Through 2034; forecasts $191B |
| Grand View Research | $31.61B | ~$38B | 27.6% | 2025 estimate extrapolated |
The spread in market size estimates reflects definitional variation: some include adjacent API management infrastructure; others scope narrowly to open banking API revenues. Axis Intelligence Research notes that the clustering of 2025 estimates around $35–$36 billion across two independent sources (Precedence, Fortune) provides reasonable confidence in that range. The CAGR range of 21–28% reflects genuine uncertainty about adoption velocity.
One figure that all sources agree on: Europe holds the largest share. Precedence Research (June 2026) and Grand View Research both place Europe at approximately 36% of the global open banking market in 2024–2025, which is consistent with the UK’s regulatory maturity lead and the mandatory PSD2 framework across 27 member states.
Open Banking API Calls: Volume and Growth
API calls are the most objective activity metric in open banking — each call represents a real transaction, account information request, or data access event, logged at the infrastructure level.
According to Juniper Research’s Global Open Banking APIs Market 2025–2029 report (February 24, 2025), global open banking API calls totaled 137 billion in 2025 and are projected to reach 720 billion by 2029 — a 427% increase over four years. Juniper attributes the acceleration primarily to AI integration: generative AI deployed within open banking platforms drives personalized financial management products and customizable lending, each requiring significantly more API calls per user session than traditional account aggregation.
The UK provides the only primary-sourced national API call figure with public quarterly verification. According to OBL’s 2025 annual review: 24 billion successful API calls in 2025, with Account Information Service (AIS) calls making up approximately 80% and Payment Information Service (PIS) calls growing 53% year-on-year — more than double the AIS growth rate of 24%.
The PIS acceleration is analytically important. PIS calls initiate money movement; AIS calls read data. A market where PIS is growing twice as fast as AIS is a market transitioning from open banking as an information layer to open banking as a payments rail. That transition, visible in UK data, is the commercial inflection that investors and payments strategists have been waiting for.
Account-to-Account Payments: Open Banking’s Commercial Frontier
Account-to-account payments (A2A) — direct bank-to-bank transfers without card network intermediaries — represent the primary commercial monetization layer of open banking infrastructure.
According to Juniper Research (September 2024), global A2A payment transactions will rise from 60 billion in 2024 to 186 billion by 2029 — a 209% increase. Transaction value will grow from $1.7 trillion in 2024 to $5.7 trillion by 2029.
The cost structure drives the commercial interest: A2A transaction fees run 0.1–0.5% of transaction value, versus 2–3.5% for credit card processing. For high-volume merchants, the differential is material. According to Aeropay’s 2025 analysis, US merchants paid $101 billion in Visa and Mastercard credit card processing fees in 2023, including $72 billion in interchange. A2A fees for equivalent volume would be an order of magnitude lower.
The market leaders vary by geography:
- Poland: Blik captures approximately 70% of local e-commerce — the highest A2A merchant share in Europe
- Netherlands and Finland: A2A payments are the leading online payment method
- Brazil: Pix processed over 6 billion transactions per month by December 2024, surpassing combined credit and debit card volumes by 80%
- UK: Open banking A2A payments account for approximately 5% of e-commerce transactions — high by European standards, but below Poland and the Nordics
The gap between A2A’s cost advantage and its e-commerce market share reflects a trust and consumer experience problem, not a technology problem. A2A payments are irrevocable — once sent, they cannot be reversed by the consumer the way a card chargeback can. The open banking ecosystem’s solution is Variable Recurring Payments with explicit consent limits, which shift the authorization model toward pre-agreed parameters rather than case-by-case confirmation.
Open Banking Security and Fraud: The Flipside of Scale
The same infrastructure that enables open banking creates new fraud surfaces. According to Open Banking Limited’s Payments Fraud Monitor (June 2026 edition), open banking payment fraud rates remain substantially lower than card fraud rates — the API-based consent model eliminates credential theft as an attack vector.
The UK’s faster payments system (which underpins open banking payments) has seen Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud grow in parallel with payment volumes. The Payment Systems Regulator’s mandatory reimbursement requirement, effective October 2023, shifted liability for APP fraud losses to payment service providers — creating a direct commercial incentive for open banking platforms to invest in real-time fraud detection.
According to secondary coverage of OBL fraud monitor data: open banking fraud as a share of total payment volume remains below 0.01% — materially lower than card fraud rates. This is structurally expected: open banking requires active customer consent and bank-grade authentication (SCA/FAPI) for every transaction, eliminating the passive card-present fraud that accounts for significant card loss volumes.
The attack vector that does affect open banking is social engineering: convincing a legitimate account holder to initiate an authorized payment to a fraudster’s account. This is not an open banking vulnerability — it is a human vulnerability that affects all payment rails. The difference is that open banking’s irrevocability makes recovery harder once the transfer executes.
Emerging Markets: India, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia
Three markets outside the established UK-Brazil-EU triad show the highest OBCRI growth trajectory scores, reflecting the structural advantage of building on modern infrastructure rather than retrofitting legacy banking systems.
India: Account Aggregator and UPI Synergy
India’s open banking framework is the Account Aggregator (AA) system, launched by the Reserve Bank of India in 2021 and operated under a financial sector regulatory umbrella covering RBI, SEBI, IRDAI, and PFRDA. The AA system allows consumers to share financial data across these regulated sectors — banking, securities, insurance, and pensions — with a single consent architecture.
By mid-2025, the AA ecosystem had processed over 60 million consents, according to industry coverage of RBI reporting. The strategic advantage India holds is infrastructure synergy: UPI’s 491 million users (NPCI 2024 data) and the AA framework operate on compatible digital identity infrastructure (Aadhaar), creating a potential 3-way flywheel — payment identity, account aggregation, and credit underwriting — that no other market has assembled at scale.
The RBI’s explicit target: 1 billion unique UPI users by December 2029. If the AA system scales proportionally, India’s open finance user base would surpass all other markets combined.
Nigeria: Fintech Infrastructure Without Centralization
Nigeria’s Open Banking framework, launched by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through the Open Banking Policy of 2021, operates in the world’s largest African economy by GDP. The CBN framework established tiered participation — Tier 1 (banking and payment data), Tier 2 (advanced data services) — without mandating a single technical standard, which has created infrastructure fragmentation.
Private sector aggregators — Mono, Okra, Pstk, Stitch — have built commercial open banking infrastructure serving Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem. The OBCRI score (54.3) reflects Nigeria’s genuine commercial activity (CAGR score: 80) against a lower regulatory maturity (60) and adoption base (38) compared to the UK and Brazil. Nigeria’s population of 220 million and its position as Africa’s largest mobile money market make it the continent’s most consequential open banking market as regulatory standardization matures.
Saudi Arabia: Vision 2030 and the SAMA Framework
Saudi Arabia’s Open Banking Framework (OBF), published by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) in 2022, is the most structured Gulf Cooperation Council approach to date. SAMA’s five-phase implementation roadmap covers AIS, PIS, and premium APIs — an architecture that mirrors the UK’s PSD2-derived structure. The Saudi OBCRI score (61.0) reflects the framework’s structural quality against still-developing adoption figures.
The strategic context is Vision 2030: Saudi Arabia’s national diversification program explicitly targets financial services infrastructure modernization. Open banking is positioned within SAMA’s Financial Sector Development Program as a mechanism for increasing financial inclusion from approximately 86% (World Bank Findex 2025 regional data) toward universal access.
Open Banking Infrastructure: The TPP Ecosystem
Third-party providers (TPPs) are the commercial engine of open banking. They build the applications and services on top of bank APIs — account aggregators, lending platforms, payment initiation services, identity verification tools, and personal finance management apps.
The UK’s 145 live TPPs (OBL Impact Report 7, March 2025) plus 406 agents represent the most dense regulated TPP ecosystem globally. The EU’s EBA register shows approximately 450 licensed AISPs and PISPs across member states as of 2025, though coverage quality varies dramatically.
The major infrastructure providers operating at global scale:
- Plaid (US): 12,000+ institution connections; US-dominant; EU/UK access via PSD2-compliant APIs
- Tink (Europe): Acquired by Visa for $2.2 billion; 3,400+ institutions across 18 markets
- TrueLayer (UK/EU): Handles nearly half of UK Pay by Bank payments; payments-specialist
- MX (US): Credit union and regional bank focus; 601M+ consumer accounts via Yodlee/Mastercard
- Yapily (Global): 19-country coverage; white-label REST infrastructure
- Belvo (Latin America): Latin America specialist; Brazil, Mexico, Colombia coverage
According to Juniper Research (February 2025), global open banking API call volume will surpass 720 billion by 2029 — a figure that implies the infrastructure layer (Plaid, Tink, TrueLayer, MX) will need to handle 5× current throughput. That infrastructure investment is the capital expenditure the market research revenue forecasts are ultimately predicting.
Methodology
Data collection: All statistics in this article derive from documents fetched and read during the production session of July 2026. No figure derives from model training memory.
Primary sources fetched: Open Banking Limited 2025 Annual Review (January 29, 2026); OBL Impact Report 7 (published 2026, March 2025 data); OBL press release on 15.16M users July 2025 (published September 1, 2025); FCA open banking progress report (February 2026); CFPB Section 1033 rulemaking page (consumerfinance.gov, current); Federal Register PFDR Final Rule (November 18, 2024, 89 Fed. Reg. 90,838); CFPB ANPR August 22, 2025 (Federal Register 2025-16139); ACCC media release on CDR non-bank lenders (July 2026); Juniper Research press releases on open banking users (April 29, 2025) and API calls (February 24, 2025); Precedence Research open banking market sizing (June 2026); TI Inside / Sensedia on Brazil 128M consents (January 22, 2026); Grand View Research market report.
OBCRI formula and inputs: Disclosed in full above. The composite uses four dimensions weighted 35/35/20/10. Regulatory maturity incorporates qualitative assessment of mandatory participation, enforcement, and standard quality — the most subjective component. Users are advised that scores for markets without public MI equivalent to OBL carry wider uncertainty ranges. The methodology is versioned (v1.0); component definitions and weights are fixed at this baseline.
Market size estimates: Axis Intelligence Research cites multiple market research firms for the market size section and notes their methodological differences. No single figure is adopted as definitive; the $35–$36 billion 2025 range is a directional consensus from two independently sourced estimates (Precedence, Fortune Business Insights).
Known limitations: Open banking measurement is not standardized globally. The UK’s OBL counts “user connections” per brand (not deduplicated individuals). Brazil counts active consents (one user may hold multiple). India counts AA consents and UPI users separately. The 183 million global user figure (Juniper) is a modeled aggregate. OBCRI scores for markets without primary public MI are directional assessments; Axis Intelligence Research will revise as data quality improves.
About This Dataset
Dataset name: open-banking-statistics-2026.csv
Coverage: Global market figures plus country-level data for UK, Brazil, EU, US, Australia, India, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mexico; OBCRI scores for 10 markets
Creator: Axis Intelligence Research
License: CC BY 4.0 — cite as: Axis Intelligence Research & Davis, S., “Open Banking Statistics 2026,” July 2026
Distribution: Hugging Face, Kaggle, GitHub
How to Cite This Article
APA:
Axis Intelligence Research & Davis, S. (2026, July 25). Open banking statistics 2026: Users, APIs, market size and country rankings. Axis Intelligence Research. https://axis-intelligence.com/open-banking-statistics/
MLA:
Axis Intelligence Research and Sarah Davis. “Open Banking Statistics 2026: Users, APIs, Market Size and Country Rankings.” Axis Intelligence Research, 25 July 2026, axis-intelligence.com/open-banking-statistics/.
Chicago:
Axis Intelligence Research and Sarah Davis. “Open Banking Statistics 2026: Users, APIs, Market Size and Country Rankings.” Axis Intelligence Research, July 25, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/open-banking-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people use open banking globally?
According to Juniper Research’s April 2025 Global Open Banking study, 183 million people used open banking services globally in 2025. This is projected to reach 645 million by 2029, a 252% increase. The figure is a modeled aggregate — individual markets use incompatible measurement frameworks, so no single-source global count exists.
Which country has the most open banking users?
Brazil leads by consent volume: 128 million active consents as of January 2026, according to Sensedia’s survey of Banco Central do Brasil data. The UK leads by the most standardized reporting: 16.5 million user connections as of December 2025, per Open Banking Limited’s verified management information from the 20 CMA9 brands.
What is the open banking market size in 2026?
According to Precedence Research (June 2026), the global open banking market is projected to grow from $35.72 billion in 2025 to $43.22 billion in 2026, expanding at a CAGR of 21%. Fortune Business Insights places the 2025 market at $35.30 billion with a 2026 projection of $42.10 billion — the two estimates are closely aligned. Europe holds approximately 36% of global market share.
What is CFPB Section 1033 and what happened to it?
The CFPB finalized its Section 1033 Personal Financial Data Rights rule on October 22, 2024 (89 Fed. Reg. 90,838, published November 18, 2024). The rule required financial institutions to make consumer account data available to third parties via API at no cost. A legal challenge was filed immediately. In August 2025, the CFPB — under new leadership — issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking signaling reconsideration of the rule, and the April 2026 compliance deadline for the largest institutions was placed on hold. As of July 2026, the rule’s status remains unresolved.
What are Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs)?
Variable Recurring Payments are an open banking payment mechanism that allows a consumer to pre-authorize a third party to initiate payments from their account within agreed limits — amount ceiling, frequency, purpose — without requiring individual approval of each payment. Unlike direct debit, VRPs can vary in amount within the authorized limits. According to OBL’s Impact Report 7, VRPs accounted for 13% of UK open banking payments as of March 2025 and grew 98% year-on-year in 2025. VRPs are the mechanism most likely to convert open banking from a niche fintech tool to a mass-market payment infrastructure.
What is the OBCRI?
The Open Banking Country Readiness Index (OBCRI), developed by Axis Intelligence Research, is a composite score measuring how ready a market is to deliver open banking at population scale. It combines Regulatory Maturity (35%), User Adoption (35%), API Infrastructure (20%), and Market Growth Trajectory (10%). The July 2026 baseline computation places the UK first at 87.2, Brazil second at 86.8, and the EU third at 73.3. The US ranks eighth at 57.5 — reflecting high commercial adoption against low regulatory standardization.
Why does Brazil rank so high despite being a developing economy?
Brazil’s Open Finance system is mandatory for all regulated financial institutions above defined thresholds, with no opt-out. Its consent architecture is standardized by the Banco Central do Brasil. Its reciprocity rule — institutions must share data if they want to consume it — prevents data asymmetry. And its integration with Pix (Brazil’s central-bank-owned instant payment system) created a flywheel where payment infrastructure and data infrastructure reinforce each other. The result is 128 million consents in 2026 — more than 7.5 times the UK’s user connection count at a comparable population multiple. That is not emerging-economy performance. It is infrastructure design outperforming market-led accumulation.
How does open banking relate to A2A payments?
Account-to-account payments (A2A) are the commercial application of open banking infrastructure: direct bank-to-bank transfers that bypass card networks. Open banking provides the consent and authentication layer; A2A is the payment that executes. Not all A2A payments use open banking (Brazil’s Pix operates independently), but open banking VRPs are a specifically open-banking-native A2A mechanism. According to Juniper Research, global A2A transaction volume will grow from 60 billion in 2024 to 186 billion by 2029, driven in part by open banking infrastructure expansion.
Others Pages: For broader digital banking market data and global user trends, see Axis Intelligence Research’s Digital Banking Statistics. For country-by-country adoption rates including mobile and online banking penetration, see Online Banking Adoption by Country. For neobank-specific metrics and funding trends, see Neobank Statistics. For the AI deployment layer transforming banking infrastructure, see AI in Banking Statistics.