Open banking has moved from a regulatory experiment into genuinely large-scale infrastructure in 2026, and the growth trajectory ahead is steep enough that it's worth understanding both the scale of what's coming and the specific direction regulation is pushing the category next.
The scale of what's already happening
Open banking API call volumes are projected to surge from 137 billion in 2025 to 720 billion globally by 2029 — a 427% increase over four years. That's not gradual, incremental growth; it's a genuine step change in how much financial data is flowing through standardized, consented API connections rather than older methods like screen scraping or manual data export.
The Financial Data Exchange (FDX), the leading US open banking standard body, reported 114 million customer API connections as of April 2025, up 50% from 76 million a year earlier — growth that's accelerating, not plateauing, even in a market (the US) that's building adoption through market-led standards rather than regulatory mandate. The global PSD2 and Open Banking market itself is valued at roughly $32.03 billion in 2026 and projected to reach $283.17 billion by 2035, a 27.4% compound annual growth rate that reflects genuinely sustained, long-term investment rather than a short-term trend.
Regional adoption tells a story about regulation versus market forces
The contrast between Europe/UK and the US is instructive. In Europe and the UK, open banking adoption hit 95% because compliance was non-negotiable — PSD2 mandated it, and banks had no realistic choice but to build compliant APIs. The US sits at 52% bank adoption, relying on market-led FDX standards rather than a regulatory mandate — meaningfully lower adoption, but still a majority, and growing steadily through competitive and customer-demand pressure rather than legal requirement.
This gap is a useful data point for anyone building fintech products that depend on open banking connectivity across multiple regions: European and UK data access via open banking APIs is considerably more standardized and universally available than US access, where coverage and API quality can still vary meaningfully bank to bank, since adoption there reflects individual institutional decisions rather than uniform regulatory compliance.
What PSD3 and FiDA are pushing toward
The next regulatory wave — PSD3 and PSR in the EU, alongside the broader FiDA (Financial Data Access) framework — is expanding the scope of open banking considerably beyond its original focus. The emphasis is shifting toward: broader open finance coverage that extends past current accounts into a wider range of financial products, standardized, machine-readable data sharing that goes beyond payments specifically, and stronger customer control over exactly who can access which data and for how long — a meaningful strengthening of the consent and access-scoping model beyond PSD2's original, comparatively coarser framework.
Regulators are also increasingly focused on making the ecosystem functional in practice, not just compliant on paper: consistent API performance standards (addressing a longstanding complaint that some banks' open banking APIs technically existed but performed poorly enough to be unreliable for real product use), mandatory fraud data-sharing between institutions, and clearer liability rules that sit squarely with payment providers rather than leaving ambiguity about who's responsible when something goes wrong in a multi-party open banking transaction.
What this means for fintechs building on open banking
Data access is broadening past payments and current accounts, which means the addressable use cases for open-banking-dependent products are expanding too — a product that was previously limited to payment-account data may soon be able to build on a considerably wider range of financial data (savings, investments, credit products) as FiDA-driven coverage expands.
API reliability is becoming a regulatory expectation, not just a nice-to-have. For teams that have previously worked around inconsistent bank API performance with defensive engineering (retries, fallbacks, graceful degradation), the regulatory push toward consistent performance standards should gradually reduce how much of that defensive complexity is strictly necessary — though building for reliability regardless remains sound practice during the transition period.
Consent granularity is going to matter more in product design. As customer control over data access scope and duration strengthens under newer regulation, products built on open banking connections need UX and technical architecture that can handle more granular, potentially time-limited consent — rather than the simpler "connected or not connected" binary that characterized earlier open banking integrations.
US and EU/UK strategies need to diverge. Given the adoption gap, a product strategy assuming uniform open banking reliability and coverage across both regions is likely to underdeliver in the US specifically — variability in bank-level API quality there remains a real, present engineering and product consideration that's less of a factor in the more uniformly regulated EU/UK market.
Open banking in 2026 has clearly moved past the "will this become real infrastructure" question — the volume growth and regulatory expansion both point toward it becoming a foundational layer of financial services infrastructure over the next several years, with the next wave of regulation specifically aimed at extending its reach well beyond the payments-focused original scope.
Sources: Spark: Open Banking in 2026 — PSD2, FDX, and the Global Data Sharing Revolution, Fabrick: Open Banking — 2026 Trends and Future Outlook, CoinLaw: Banking API Statistics 2026
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