UK Open Banking Breaks Billion-Payment Barrier, Hits 100 Billion API Calls

The United Kingdom's open banking infrastructure has achieved significant milestones, surpassing one billion cumulative Open Banking payments and recording over 100 billion API calls across the nine largest high street banks, known as the CMA9. These figures represent the cumulative activity since the regime's inception more than eight years ago and underscore the robust growth of the UK's financial technology ecosystem.

Open Banking Limited (OBL), the entity responsible for overseeing the framework mandated by the Competition and Markets Authority, released these impressive figures on July 28, 2026, coinciding with its detailed June 2026 performance data. The monthly statistics for June painted a positive picture: API traffic reached an unprecedented high of 2.81 billion calls, marking a 4.4% increase from the previous month. Total payment volumes remained steady at 40.16 million for the month. Within this, the composition shifted slightly, with Single Domestic Payments decreasing by 1.2% to 32.43 million, while Sweeping Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) demonstrated strong growth, rising by 6.7% to 7.73 million. Operational efficiency also improved, with the average response time enhancing to 349 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds faster than the preceding reporting period, and weighted availability across the CMA9 maintaining an impressive 99.80%. Curiously, user connections experienced a 4.2% monthly decline, reaching 18.81 million, a metric OBL did not directly address but noted could reflect churn or re-consent cycles.

Henk Van Hulle, chief executive of Open Banking Limited, emphasized that these cumulative milestones affirm "the UK’s position as a global leader in Open Banking" and clearly illustrate "an ecosystem that continues to scale in both volume and capability." The marked acceleration in Variable Recurring Payments is particularly noteworthy for commercial operators. VRPs offer a flexible payment solution, enabling a third party to initiate a series of payments within pre-agreed parameters set by the account holder. This functionality makes them ideally suited for various applications such as subscription billing, automated savings, and utility sweeping, moving beyond traditional one-off payments.

The commercial VRP market, which expands the model beyond its initial use case of sweeping funds between a customer's own accounts, has been under active development, with numerous Payment Initiation Service Providers and banks trialing innovative frameworks. The consistent month-on-month growth observed suggests that VRP adoption is now progressing beyond the pilot stage into broader implementation. This evolution occurs within a significant regulatory landscape, where HM Treasury is actively working on the future direction of open banking, and the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) is pursuing a vision for a commercially sustainable open banking ecosystem. OBL's own role is also in transition, moving from a CMA-mandated structure towards a more enduring governance model. The speed of this transition will be crucial in determining how swiftly new standards, including those necessary for comprehensive Open Finance encompassing mortgages, investments, and pensions data, can be rolled out.

Internationally, the UK's recent cumulative figures arrive at a time when other comparable open banking regimes in regions like the EU (under PSD2 and the forthcoming PSD3), Brazil, Australia, and India are also establishing their own traffic benchmarks. While the UK retains a first-mover advantage in payment initiation compared to much of Europe, the disparity in user-connection penetration when stacked against some international markets presents a longer-term strategic question for the ecosystem. Looking ahead, OBL is expected to report on key future milestones, including the trajectory of the commercial VRP rollout and the progress made towards the new governance arrangements, both anticipated for later in 2026.