In the UK, 8.2% of digitally enabled customers made an open banking payment in January 2024, and open banking payments represent a tiny share of total payments volume. There was palpable energy and optimism at Money20/20 Europe, however, and focus on pragmatic solutions that should see open banking payments accelerate rapidly from 2025.

Open banking in the United States is taking a very different form compared to open banking across the pond in Europe — more advanced in some areas, less so in others. As the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) pushes forward with an open banking rule, what is already an active, organic market will become far hotter.

Larger banks are in a stronger position when it comes to enabling open finance. But it is their customers that are most likely to be poached. Smaller and midsized banks will need help to implement open banking solutions, increasing reliance on open banking intermediaries.

Open Banking Intermediaries Switch Focus From Aggregation To Adding Value These days, using an intermediary is less likely to be for compliance with open banking standards and more likely to underpin ambitions in an open finance future. Intermediaries, now an established part of the landscape, are responding to growing interest in and adoption of open banking among both consumers and businesses and are pivoting toward open and embedded finance.

Figure 2 The Gap Between Open Banking Interest And Adoption Will Narrow Through 2027 A line chart shows the increase in open banking interest and open banking users in the UK from 2019 to 2027. Forrester forecasts that the share of online adults adopting open banking will increase by over 40 percentage points during that period; interest in open banking is expected to grow by just over 10 percentage points. This means the gap between open banking interest and adoption will narrow.

Read on for a look at Forrester’s evaluation of the 13 most significant open banking intermediaries: The Forrester Wave™: Open Banking Intermediaries, Q1 2023.

Forrester defines an open banking intermediary as: A platform that mediates the open banking connections between banks and third parties, supporting data and/or payment aggregation and streamlining access to innovation. Account providers generally use open banking intermediaries to aggregate access to multiple third-party providers via a single connection or to short-circuit the creation of open banking interfaces and APIs (see Figure 1).

Over the next five years, Forrester predicts a doubling in adoption of open banking across European countries and use cases. Explore more insights from our inaugural European open banking forecast.

Banking Sales Best Practices: Customer Onboarding. This report shares the key principals and best practices we uncovered from leading firms in onboarding customers after they apply for and open a bank account through their mobile site. The Forrester Digital Experience Review™: North American Banking Sales Mobile Sites, Q3 2024.

SBS’s DBEP is superior to others on security, open banking, and embedded finance: Customers can rely on its platform for compliant open banking functionality and can white-label and embed individual products or the bank’s whole product suite as a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) proposition. SBS’s existing low-code tools are another strength: Bank employees can quickly and easily redesign experience components, as well as build and test new workflows, on the platform.