Eight Years of Open Banking Data Taught Me One Thing: We Are Not Getting Closer to Interoperability

I started tracking open banking APIs in 2017, when PSD2 was the only game in town. Eight years and several million site visitors later, the picture looks nothing like what most of us expected. We now track 80+ regulatory frameworks across open banking, open finance, and e-invoicing globally. The number keeps growing. The interoperability does not.

That should concern everyone building financial infrastructure.

The UK succeeded. Nobody copied the right parts.

The UK hit 33 million open banking payment transactions in a single month in late 2025. Over 16 million live user connections. By any measure, this is a mature, working ecosystem. But here is the thing people keep getting wrong: the blueprint that 60+ jurisdictions claim to have adopted is not what made the UK work. What made it work was consistent governance, a single trusted standard, and an implementation entity with real authority. Almost nobody copied those parts.

Instead, we got a global patchwork. PSD2 in Europe with PSD3 now politically agreed and heading for compliance in 2027-2028. Section 1033 in the US, phased through 2030 on paper but currently frozen by litigation and political headwinds. Consumer Data Right in Australia. Account Aggregator in India. SGFinDex in Singapore. Open Banking Saudi Arabia. Consumer-Driven Banking in Canada. New frameworks proposed in Colombia, Chile, South Africa, Kenya, the Philippines, and more. Each with different scopes, different timelines, different technical standards, and different definitions of what data is even in scope.

We are not converging. We are fragmenting. And every new framework adds compliance overhead for anyone trying to build cross-border.

Open Finance is real, but the name hides the complexity

Open Banking gave consumers control over their bank transaction data. Open Finance extends that to investments, pensions, insurance, and beyond. The EU’s FIDA proposal will, if passed, create the most ambitious open finance framework anywhere. But the regulatory surface area is expanding in ways that most industry maps do not capture.

Take e-invoicing. Most of Europe will have mandatory electronic invoicing within five years. Over 50 countries already have active or upcoming mandates. The compliance burden is real, and the overlap with open finance regulation is growing fast. Yet most people in the open banking world are not paying attention to it. The regulatory perimeter for structured financial data now extends well beyond bank accounts, and our industry conversations have not caught up.

When we built an interactive regulatory map covering all of these frameworks in one place, the reaction from founders and compliance teams was the same: they had no idea how many overlapping mandates they were going to be dealing with in the next three years.

AI agents need this sorted yesterday

There is a new urgency to getting financial data standards right, and it has nothing to do with regulation. AI agents are coming for financial workflows. We already see banks exploring MCP server support, and fintech companies building agent-friendly APIs for accounting, payments, and treasury operations. The assumption behind all of this is that financial data will be structured, standardised, and accessible enough for autonomous software to act on it reliably.

After eight years of tracking open banking adoption, I can tell you: we are nowhere near that level of consistency. If human developers still struggle with the inconsistencies between different banks’ API implementations within a single country, good luck deploying an AI agent that needs to work across jurisdictions. The agentic finance conversation is exciting, but it is running ahead of the infrastructure reality.

What needs to happen

First, the industry needs to stop treating interoperability as a future goal and start treating it as a present failure. Eight years in, we should be further along. The fact that a fintech expanding from the UK to the EU to the US still faces three completely different API ecosystems is not a feature of the system. It is a design flaw.

Second, the conversation around open finance needs to include e-invoicing, accounting data, and payroll. The data that matters for financial decision-making is not limited to bank accounts. The regulatory world already recognises this. Our industry should too.

Third, if we are serious about AI agents operating in financial services, we need to invest in data quality and standard adoption with the same energy we have invested in API availability. Access without consistency is just noise at scale.

The honest question

After tracking this space since 2017, maintaining a dataset of over 50,000 financial institutions, and watching regulation evolve across 80+ jurisdictions, I keep coming back to the same question: are we actually getting closer to a world where financial data flows freely and reliably across borders? Or are we just building more frameworks?

I genuinely do not know the answer. But I think it is a question the industry needs to stop avoiding.