Summary

• Open Banking Limited says the UK ecosystem has passed one billion payments and 100 billion API calls.
• June 2026 saw 2.81bn API calls, 40.16m payments, and 7.73m sweeping variable recurring payments.
• The milestone reinforces open banking’s shift from regulatory intervention to operational financial infrastructure.

Open Banking Limited says the UK open banking ecosystem has passed one billion payments and 100 billion API calls, reinforcing the role of bank APIs as operating infrastructure rather than a regulatory experiment still waiting for adoption.

The figures cover the CMA9 banks, the UK’s largest current account providers. More than one billion open banking payments have now been initiated through major high street banks since launch, while API calls across the CMA9 have exceeded 100 billion.

Monthly API traffic reached 2.81bn calls in June 2026, up 4.4 percent month on month and the highest monthly volume recorded by Open Banking Limited. Open banking payments reached 40.16m during the month. Single domestic payments fell 1.2 percent to 32.43m, while sweeping variable recurring payments rose 6.7 percent to 7.73m.

Operational performance is just as important as the headline totals. Open Banking Limited reported weighted availability of 99.80 percent, unweighted availability of 99.35 percent, and average response time of 349ms. API rails cannot support payments, accounting software, cash flow tools, lending products, and account aggregation if they behave like experimental interfaces.

Henk Van Hulle, chief executive of Open Banking Limited, said: “These milestones reinforce the UK’s position as a global leader in Open Banking and demonstrate an ecosystem that continues to scale in both volume and capability. As adoption increases and new use cases emerge, Open Banking will play an increasingly vital role in supporting competition, innovation and growth across the UK’s financial services landscape.”

The milestone is not a newly emerging trend. Open banking has been moving into payments, account data, personal finance, SME services, affordability checks, cash flow management, and accounting workflows for years. The importance of the latest figures is that they show enough load passing through the system to make resilience, commercial incentives, and governance more consequential.

Account-to-account payments can reduce reliance on card networks in some contexts, while permissioned bank data can improve credit assessment, reconciliation, fraud checks, and financial automation. The strongest business use cases often sit inside existing workflows rather than consumer-facing app experiences.

The figures also show unevenness. User connections fell 4.2 percent in June to 18.81m, and payment types moved in different directions. Variable recurring payments are growing, but the broader open finance framework will still need careful design if bank data is to support pensions, savings, insurance, credit, and other financial services without weakening trust.

The UK’s next challenge is not proving that open banking works. It is deciding how the infrastructure is governed, funded, expanded, and made commercially attractive enough for banks, fintechs, software providers, merchants, and end users to keep building on it.