The Open Banking Expo Awards 2026 shortlist has been published, covering 22 categories after what the organisers describe as a record year for entries, including a 46% increase in submissions compared with the previous cycle.
The awards, now in their seventh year, are run by Borough Bench Media and aim to recognise organisations, initiatives, teams and individuals driving development in open banking, open finance and the wider data-sharing ecosystem globally. The categories span payments, fraud prevention, AI, customer experience, data, infrastructure, financial inclusion, regulation and industry leadership.
From entries to shortlist: the 2026 timeline
According to Coinpedia Events, entries opened on 27 April with a final deadline of 22 July, and the shortlist was announced in the first week of September. The winners will be revealed at a ceremony held at the Business Design Centre in London on 13 October.
That timeline matters for context. A three-month entry window, followed by an independent judging stage before October, means the process is not a rapid online poll. Shortlisted entries will be assessed by panels of industry experts before winners are decided, according to the organisers.
Kelly Stanley, co-founder of Open Banking Expo, attributed the surge in entries partly to the broadening origin of applicants. ‘What has been particularly striking this year is the breadth of the entries,’ she said. ‘We’re seeing innovation coming from established financial institutions, fintechs and technology providers, but also increasingly from organisations applying Open Banking and Open Finance to solve very specific customer and industry challenges.’
Open Banking Expo Awards 2026: why categories were split
The volume of entries prompted structural changes to several categories. The Best Use of AI in Open Banking and Open Finance award has been divided into two: one covering Customer Experience and Decisioning, the other covering Operations, Risk and Compliance. The rationale, as Stanley put it, is that some categories ‘had simply become too broad,’ and the split is intended to allow judges to ‘compare like with like.’
A similar expansion has been applied to infrastructure. The Best Open Banking Infrastructure category now separates into Ecosystem Enablers and Platform Providers, drawing a distinction between organisations building frameworks, standards and connectivity and those providing the technology platforms that enable open banking and open finance services.
Industry leadership recognition has also been restructured. Two distinct awards now exist: Industry Technology Leader of the Year and Industry Ecosystem Leader of the Year. These sit alongside Advocate of the Year and two Women in Open Banking individual awards.
Whether the category expansions reflect genuine maturation of the ecosystem or simply a response to competitive entry volume is a fair question. The organisers make the former argument. The latter is consistent with it, of course: more entrants means more breadth, which can make broad categories harder to judge coherently. Splitting them is a reasonable administrative response, regardless of what one reads into the underlying growth story.
Among the organisations on the 2026 shortlist are HSBC, Monzo, Santander, Lloyds Banking Group, Experian, Symcor, Millennium bcp, PayPoint, Token.io, Volt, Raidiam, Ozone API, Open Banking Limited, Tink, QUALCO UK and UK Payments Initiative, alongside businesses and initiatives from the international open banking and open finance community.
The individual awards draw from a separate pool. Leaders and advocates from the Bank for International Settlements, Deutsche Bank, Nordea, Virgin Media O2, HSBC, Ozone API, FDATA and Open Finance Network of Canada are among those recognised at the individual level.
Stanley’s summary of the situation was direct: ‘With a record number of entries, reaching this stage is a real achievement, and I’m looking forward to seeing what our judging panels make of an exceptionally strong field.’
The full 2026 shortlist is available on the Open Banking Expo website, and the judging stage is now under way ahead of the October ceremony at the Business Design Centre.
