ADOPTION ANALYSIS:
OPEN BANKING PENETRATION
Adoption grows to 1 in 5
We have seen continued growth in the proportion of people and small businesses who have an active open banking connection or have made an open banking payment in the past month.
In March 2025, 1 in 5 or 18.4% of people and small businesses with online access to their current account were open banking active. This marks a new record high, with 13.3 million active open banking users.
Looking at data over the past five years, we can see that penetration has climbed from:
In March 2025, 13.3m users were open banking active4, up by 40% on the previous year, and growth continues to be sustained. Looking at the longer-term trend, we can now see a period in late 2023, where the growth started to slow down, with year-on-year growth dropping to around 20%.
The second half of 2024 saw a decisive return to growth, with 40%-50% year-on-year growth rates. Continuing with this level of growth, we anticipate one-quarter of accounts will be open banking active in the first half of 2026.
Figure 1: Open Banking Penetration
[4] Open banking active is defined as either having an open banking data connection which has been used in that calendar month or having made at least one open banking payment.
Consumer adoption closes in on small business
In previous reports, we have seen small business penetration run ahead of consumer use, partly due to the high adoption of open banking-enabled cloud accounting propositions, which have proved transformational for small businesses.
For the first time, this report sees consumer adoption reach almost the same level as small business, with adoption rates now very similar for the first time since open banking launched in 2018.
Small business penetration appears to have started to level off at between 18%–20% penetration, while consumer adoption continues to grow, even accelerating through 2024 and early 2025. On this basis, we would expect consumer adoption to exceed that of small business in the coming months.
Figure 2: Open Banking Penetration: Retail vs Consumer
Payments lead, but data adoption has returned to growth
Open banking payment adoption has now decisively overtaken open banking data sharing. The crossover point came in the middle of 2023, and payments growth has continued to run at a higher level than data penetration.
During 2022 and 2023, we observed a levelling off in usage of open banking data propositions, which was also seen in the market exit of some well-used services, such as Money Dashboard in October 2023.
However, the open banking data sharing market continues to evolve, and as noted in previous reports, new innovations such as the embedding of a balance feature in Apple Wallet® using open banking, implemented in September 2023, could be one factor in the return to growth in data adoption.
Payments adoption continues to expand, and we will explore some of the key drivers behind this expansion in more detail in the following sections.
Figure 3: Open Banking Penetration: Data vs Payments[5]
® Apple and Apple Wallet are trademarks of Apple Inc, registered in the US and other countries and regions.
[5] Note that some customers (around 1.5%) use both payments and data and therefore these numbers cannot be added together to give overall penetration.
Expansion leads to record growth in payments
The number of open banking payments recorded by OBL (based on data provided by the CMA9, the nine banks subject to the CMA Order only) reached 27.2m in March 2025. This is a record high and represents 67% year-on-year growth. As the graph below shows, the 65%–75% growth year-on-year has been maintained as open banking payments have scaled.
Figure 4: Total Open Banking Payments
While the analysis is not yet conclusive, data from industry body Pay.UK indicates that non-CMA9 banks represent an additional 15% of payments, so the true total number of open banking payments is estimated to be as high as 31m. We will continue to refine this analysis.
Key trends
OBL does not see data from individual TPPs or merchants, but based on public reports from key players in the open banking ecosystem, we can highlight some potential drivers and trends:
January is the traditional month for HMRC to collect self-assessment tax payments and typically sees a seasonal peak. This year, Ecospend, a Trustly company, which provides open banking payment services to HMRC, saw a 32% increase in payments made and a total of 1,335,316 payments, with a value of £4.7bn to HMRC in January 2025, and these continue to be impressive numbers.
However, it is notable that these 1.3m transactions represented just over 5% of total payments in January 2025, showing the breadth and variety of open banking payments so far this year.
There are reports that use of open banking payments for travel is expanding: Trustly has also reported that use of open banking payments in the travel sector has grown by 230%, with clients including Norwegian, KLM, Wizz Air, Booking.com, Air France and Stena Line[6].
TrueLayer, which claims to have 40% share of open banking payments in the UK, reports that it is seeing e-commerce transactions growing at 500%, with new merchants including Ryanair, Just Eat, lastminute.com, Topps Tiles, William Hill and Flutter[7].
Tesco has reported that open banking payments used to repay its credit card customers’ bills have grown 40% between September 2022 and August 2023 and have seen a 20% growth in payment share[8].
Savings and investment platform Hargreaves Lansdowne has announced that open banking payments, where available, account for 30% of its total payment mix[9].
These are just a handful of examples of the way in which open banking payments are developing and growing, based on reported data by providers.
Variable recurring payments (VRPs) are now becoming a significant proportion of overall volume, growing to 13% of open banking payments in March 2025 and a record high of 3.7m payments.
[6] https://www.trustly.com/press/2025/02/uk-travel-spending-via-open-banking-jumps-230-in-2025-so-far.
[7] https://truelayer.com/blog/announcements/truelayer-hits-10-million-consumers-acquiring-a-new-user-every-3-seconds/
[8] https://openbankingeu.mastercard.com/blog/tesco-bank-expands-partnership-with-mastercard-open-banking-to-offer-top-up-payments/
[9] Hargreaves Lansdown extends Ecospend’s Pay by Bank solution to every client
Industry view
Greta Akintoye
Head of Public Sector Strategy at Ecospend
"We believe our work with HMRC is one of the most innovative relationships to embed fintech in Government, setting a global standard.
Open banking allows HMRC to offer a simpler, faster, and more secure payment experience for taxpayers. We have been thrilled to see a substantial increase in people using open banking for self-assessment payments in the 2024-2025 tax year."
A key part of the UK’s payment mix
An interesting metric to assess how far open banking payments have come is to express the total volume of open banking payments as a proportion of Faster Payments[10]. This shows a continued steady increase, reaching 7.0% by March 2025.
Figure 7: Total Open Banking Payments as a % of FPS Single Immediate Payments
[10] This data from Pay.UK for the total number of FPS Single Immediate Payments. The graph takes the volume of open banking payments reported by the CMA9 only and expresses this as a proportion of the total. It therefore excludes any payments originating from non-CMA9 ASPSPs.
Pay.UK has also provided data on average ticket value (ATV), with the average open banking payment being £473, compared to £752 for FPS Single Immediate Payments overall[11]. Tracking these ATVs over time, we can see the FPS ATV slowly increasing, while the open banking payment ATV is slowly declining.
While several open banking payment use cases remain high value (tax payments and credit card repayments, for example), new use cases seem to be slowly driving the ATV down.
[11] As the CMA9 only report payment volumes not values, we have used Pay.UK data in this section unless otherwise noted. Pay.UK has implemented an open banking flag in FPS, which allows estimation of open banking volumes and values and therefore an ATV calculation is possible.
Industry view
Euan Ballantyne
Product Director, Pay.UK
"The consistent and significant growth in open banking payments processed via Faster Payments is a very positive sign that A2A retail payments are becoming increasingly widespread across the ecosystem.
The continued collaborative efforts of OBL, Pay.UK and the key PISPs and PSPs will be key to maintaining this positive trajectory."
Figure 8: Average Transaction Value: FPS Single Immediate Payment vs Open Banking Payments
Using this data also allows us to estimate the total value of open banking payments, which accounted for £12.9bn in March 2025[12].
[12]This calculation applies the ATV which is calculated from Pay.UK FPS data and applies it to volumes as reported to OBL by the CMA9. Accounting for non-CMA9 volumes, the total would be £14.8bn.
Small business payments emerging as new growth driver
If we look at the way in which consumers and small businesses are using open banking, we can see the importance of payment growth in driving increased adoption. Consumers have been quicker to adopt open banking payments than small businesses, but there are signs that small businesses are also starting to use open banking payments in greater numbers.
Figure 9: Open Banking Penetration: Retail Users (AIS vs PIS vs Both)
Figure 10: Open Banking Penetration: Small Business Users (AIS vs PIS vs Both)
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