Open Banking Intermediaries

Open banking was supposed to route around the card networks. Payments moving directly from one bank account to another, initiated through an API, with no interchange fee and no scheme in the middle.

Two of the most prominent companies building that infrastructure are now owned by card networks. Visa acquired Tink. Mastercard acquired Finicity. Both appear in Forrester's evaluation of this market, under those ownership arrangements.

That is not a scandal and it is not a failure of the open banking project. It is the clearest available illustration of what actually happened to this category, which is that a compliance-driven infrastructure play became a strategic asset that incumbents were willing to pay for.

What an intermediary does

European regulation obliged banks to expose customer account data and payment initiation through APIs. Every bank implemented that obligation slightly differently, with different authentication flows, different data formats, different reliability, and different interpretations of the standard.

A company wanting to build a product on top of bank data therefore faced not one integration but hundreds, each with its own quirks and none of which it controlled.

An intermediary absorbs that. It maintains connections to thousands of institutions, normalises the data into a consistent format, handles authentication and consent, manages the licensing required to act as a regulated third party, and presents a single API to its customers.

Two capabilities sit on top of that plumbing. Data services, meaning account aggregation, transaction categorisation, income and affordability verification, and the analytics built on them. And payment initiation, meaning moving money directly from a payer's account.

From emerging to established

The Forrester New Wave: Open Banking Intermediaries, Q1 2021, authored by Jacob Morgan, evaluated nine providers against ten criteria as an emerging market: Bud, Fabrick, ndgit, Plaid, Salt Edge, TESOBE, Tink, TrueLayer, and Yolt Technology Services.

The Forrester Wave: Open Banking Intermediaries, Q1 2023, published on 21 March 2023 and also by Morgan, was the inaugural full Wave, evaluating thirteen providers against twenty four criteria: Bud Financial, CRIF, Envestnet, Finicity, finleap connect, Klarna, MX Technologies, Plaid, Salt Edge, Tink, Token, TrueLayer, and Yapily.

The promotion from New Wave to Wave is Forrester's formal marker that a market has stopped emerging. Morgan's framing was that intermediaries had become an established part of the financial services landscape after three years of coverage as an emerging sector.

Plaid and Tink took the highest marks. Forrester described Plaid's scale, coverage, and ambition as targeting a global open finance ecosystem, noting that in its first decade it had grown into a leading North American aggregator with presence in Europe and the UK and further regional expansion planned.

Envestnet also placed as a Leader, with the highest possible score in ten criteria including consent management and lifecycle, client processes, product vision, execution roadmap, and innovation ecosystem and partner network, credited for depth in data aggregation and for unifying multiple financial services sectors into open finance.

Four names from the 2021 field are absent from 2023, and eight new ones appear. That is substantial turnover in two years, in a market Forrester had just declared mature.

The three shifts

Forrester identified three ways intermediary go-to-market strategies were moving, and each one describes a different business.

From consumer to business services. The original use cases were consumer-facing: personal finance management, account aggregation in a budgeting app. The revenue turned out to be in business applications, meaning lending decisions, affordability assessment, accounting integration, and treasury.

From data to payments. Data aggregation was the first capability and it monetises poorly, because customers pay per API call for something increasingly commoditised. Payment initiation monetises per transaction, at volumes that scale with commerce rather than with queries.

From single capability to end-to-end value. Providers moved from selling connectivity to selling outcomes: risk profiling, tailored insights, embedded authorisation, and in some cases carbon tracking on transaction data.

The middle shift is the commercially decisive one, and it explains the acquisitions. A company that moves payments is strategically relevant to a payments network. A company that aggregates account data is a useful capability. The valuations differ accordingly.

From compliance to opportunity

Morgan's summary of what changed captures the category's maturation precisely: using an intermediary is now less likely to be about compliance with open banking standards and more likely to underpin ambitions in an open finance future.

That is a reversal of the original demand driver.

When European regulation landed, banks needed to expose APIs whether or not they wanted to, and many engaged intermediaries to help them meet an obligation. The work was defensive, the budget came from compliance, and success meant not being penalised.

Open finance is offensive. It extends the same principle beyond current accounts to savings, investments, pensions, insurance, and mortgages, and the reason to participate is building products rather than satisfying a supervisor.

Envestnet's recognition for unifying multiple sectors into open finance describes exactly that expansion. So does the appearance of Klarna and CRIF in the vendor list, companies whose core businesses are payments and credit information rather than API connectivity.

The practical consequence for a buyer is that intermediaries are no longer interchangeable plumbing. A provider optimised for regulatory connectivity and one optimised for building revenue-generating products are different purchases, and the Wave contains both.

Geography decides more than the tier

Forrester's caution alongside the evaluation is important and easy to miss: while it now considers the market mature, this varies greatly by region, with North America and the UK holding some of the most established providers while fluidity persists elsewhere.

The regulatory paths explain the divergence.

Europe mandated open banking through payment services regulation, which forced every institution to open APIs on a common timeline. That produced broad coverage and uneven quality, and it created the intermediary category as a response to the unevenness. Subsequent European legislative work extends the framework further, into what is generally described as open finance.

The United States took the opposite route. For most of this period there was no mandate, so aggregation grew commercially, initially through screen scraping and later through bilateral agreements between aggregators and large institutions. Regulatory rulemaking on personal financial data rights arrived much later and has been contested since.

That difference matters for a buyer in a specific way. A provider built in a mandated market has coverage that regulation guaranteed and may have thin commercial relationships with institutions. A provider built in a commercial market has negotiated access that is deeper where it exists and absent where it does not.

For a European organisation, the questions worth asking are about coverage quality per market rather than coverage breadth. How many institutions in the specific countries you operate in, what proportion of accounts that represents, what the API reliability actually looks like, and what happens when a bank's interface breaks.

That last question is the operational reality of this category. Bank APIs go down, change without notice, and behave inconsistently. Absorbing that is most of what an intermediary does, and it is invisible in a capability comparison.

The skills gap vendors are filling

One finding in the research is worth noting because it describes a market correction.

Forrester had previously observed that many financial services firms lacked the executive focus or internal skills to fully exploit the open finance opportunity, and noted that several vendors were responding by investing beyond developer-facing services, offering consultancy.

An infrastructure provider adding advisory services usually indicates that the technology was not the constraint. Banks had access to the APIs and did not know what to build with them, which is a strategy problem rather than an integration problem.

That is a familiar pattern from other categories in this series, where the analysis is available and nothing changes because nobody owns the decision. It also creates a mild conflict worth being aware of: an intermediary advising you on your open finance strategy has a view on which capabilities you should build, and it sells those capabilities.

Where this leaves the category

Open banking did not disintermediate the payment networks. It produced a set of specialist infrastructure companies, two of which the networks bought, and it moved from a compliance obligation to a product foundation.

Whether account-to-account payments displace cards at scale remains genuinely open, and it varies enormously by market. Where instant payment rails are mature and consumer habits support it, the economics are compelling for merchants. Where card acceptance is entrenched and consumers value the protections cards provide, adoption has been slower than advocates expected.

What is settled is that the connectivity layer is now infrastructure rather than innovation. The differentiation moved up, into insights, risk assessment, embedded experiences, and the vertical products built on top.

For anyone evaluating in this space, that is the useful frame. Connectivity is table stakes and should be assessed on reliability and regional coverage rather than on capability. Everything that determines whether the investment produces anything sits above it, and it depends far more on knowing what you intend to build than on which provider you select.

Forrester does not endorse any provider named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy. Nothing here is financial advice.