Salt Edge premium APIs are the subject of a new report from the company, which argues that the Open Banking infrastructure banks built for regulatory compliance can be repurposed as a direct revenue stream, if banks are willing to move beyond the mandatory minimum.
The report, titled Beyond compliance: premium APIs as a commercial opportunity for banks, is built around an analysis of the public developer portals of the 45 largest European banks. Salt Edge says that 58% of those banks already offer premium APIs, a figure that suggests the market is not merely hypothetical. What the report is really making, though, is a commercial pitch: that banks risk being bypassed in their corporate clients’ workflows unless they offer richer, more deeply integrated services.
What Salt Edge premium APIs actually cover
The product categories Salt Edge describes go well beyond basic account information and payment initiation. According to Salt Edge, the premium API roster includes variable recurring payments, sweeping, Request to Pay, account notifications, corporate payment services in both single and bulk form, ERP integration and multi-banking. Among the 45 banks surveyed, foreign exchange APIs are offered by 13 banks (28.9%), data verification and identity services by 12 banks (26.7%), and loans and lease financing by 10 banks (22.2%).
The company’s broader platform, it claims, can connect to over 5,000 banks, a figure cited in its own Open Banking ecosystem resources. That reach matters to the commercial argument: Salt Edge is positioning itself as the connective layer between corporate clients’ ERP and treasury systems and a wide network of banking partners, using ISO 20022 as the data standard.
The pricing question and the regulatory context
Salt Edge’s report outlines several pricing models banks might adopt: pay-as-you-go for usage-driven services, subscriptions for recurring access, transaction-based fees for payment APIs, and revenue-sharing where the bank participates in value generated through the API. Backbase notes that Salt Edge’s own pricing operates on a subscription basis with API call options, which at least gives some indication of how the company structures what it sells, even as it advises others on commercial models.
The report is careful to situate premium APIs within the regulatory landscape rather than against it. Regulation, Salt Edge argues, provides the foundation while leaving space for banks to build further. The proposed FiDA framework, which would expand the scope of data sharing across the EU, is cited as a potential prompt for banks to think more ambitiously about what they offer on commercial terms.
The core operational problem the report identifies is straightforward: most banks have built their Open Banking infrastructure as a compliance layer, separate from any commercial API stack. Maintaining two parallel systems is expensive and unwieldy. Salt Edge’s answer is a single Open Finance platform that handles both regulatory and commercial APIs, extending existing PSD2 infrastructure rather than duplicating it.
Victor Colta, product owner at Salt Edge, put the competitive logic plainly: ‘Corporate clients are already pulling bank data into their ERP systems. The only question is whether it happens through the bank’s own channels, or around them. Premium APIs are how a bank stays inside relationships it would otherwise lose visibility into.’
That framing, banks losing visibility rather than merely losing revenue, is deliberate. SMEs running daily operations through ERP platforms and corporate treasurers needing real-time account data are not waiting for banks to catch up; they are finding workarounds. The report’s argument is that premium APIs close the gap before those workarounds become permanent habits.
What the report does not provide, at least in summary form, is independent evidence that banks deploying premium APIs have seen measurable commercial returns. The 58% adoption figure tells us that products exist; it does not tell us how they are performing. Salt Edge is a vendor with a platform to sell, and the report is transparently a commercial document as well as an analytical one. That does not make the underlying argument wrong, but it is worth keeping in mind when weighing the claims.
Salt Edge is the Open Finance Show Partner of Open Banking Expo UK & Europe 2026, which takes place on 13-14 October at the Business Design Centre in London.
