What is an Open Banking API?

An open banking API facilitates the sharing of open banking data between financial institutions and authorised third parties. The exchange of customer data between banks and authorised third parties through open banking is typically achieved by the bank developing open APIs for Account Information Services and Payment Initiation Services that other banks and financial service providers can retrieve data from.

While banks have their APIs for data sharing, a FinTech provider for example can extract the raw data from the bank’s API and make e.g. aggregated data available via its own API. Both the bank and FinTech’s APIs here may be considered “open banking APIs”.