The UK’s Open Banking ecosystem has reached two milestones that underline how far the infrastructure has come, but, as Rich Mansell of Concentrix argues, Open Banking value creation is still the harder, unfinished task. More than one billion payments and 100 billion API calls have now been processed across the CMA9 banks, and the numbers behind those headline figures fill in a detailed picture of a system that is, by technical measures, working well.
What the milestone figures actually show
In June 2026 alone, FF News reported that the ecosystem handled 2.81 billion API calls, a 4.4% month-on-month increase, and that 99.5% of reported API calls were successful. According to Bob’s Guide, 40.16 million successful open banking payments were completed in that same month. Performance has also improved: Invela notes that average response times reached 349ms, some 50ms faster than the previous reporting period.
These are not trivial gains. Early challenges around stability, response times and outages created real friction, and resolving them required sustained effort across the industry. The infrastructure, by any reasonable reading, now operates at scale. The question Mansell poses is whether that infrastructure is being used to deliver something customers actually value.
Open Banking value creation requires more than a working API
Mansell, writing in his capacity as senior director and sector lead banking and financial services at Concentrix, draws a distinction that the industry sometimes blurs: infrastructure is not the same as impact, and an API call is not a customer outcome. ‘Nobody wakes up in the morning hoping to grant a financial-data permission,’ he writes. ‘People do care about what that permission enables though: receiving a responsible lending decision more quickly, understanding where their money is going, spotting the early signs of financial difficulty, avoiding unnecessary charges, or being protected from fraud.’
The company’s position is that most financial organisations do not have a shortage of data. The difficulty is turning it into something useful at the moment it can make a real difference. An insight may exist inside a credit-risk system but never reach the colleague speaking to the customer. A bank may recognise changing spending patterns but continue sending the same generic communications. Mansell describes this as a customer-experience and operating-model challenge as much as a technology one.
Everyday Loans is cited as one example of the approach Mansell is advocating. The company reportedly used Open Banking to streamline its lending process, reducing the time needed for affordability checks and enabling faster decisions alongside a more transparent customer experience. The report does not provide outcome figures, so it is worth noting the claim is Mansell’s own illustration of the model rather than independently verified evidence.
Trust, Mansell argues, is not only about obtaining informed consent before data is shared. It is also shaped by what happens after the customer says yes. He describes a pattern where customers are asked to share sensitive financial information without experiencing a clear benefit, and where data is used in ways they did not expect. In personal finance, he gives the example of a customer who shares data for income verification only to find that transactions flagged as higher risk alter their pricing or risk profile. ‘While these practices may be compliant,’ he writes, ‘they can significantly diverge from customer expectations, ultimately undermining trust in the institution.’
The role of AI sits at the centre of Mansell’s argument about what comes next. He contends that AI without reliable, permissioned data risks producing fast but flimsy decisions. Used alongside open banking data, however, it could allow support to become more proactive, moving from responding to events after they happen towards recognising when a customer may need help. The FCA’s July 2026 Mills Review is referenced as framing a potential shift towards increasingly delegated services, with a corresponding need for reliability, accountability and human oversight.
The regulatory direction is also moving. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 provides the government with powers to create new Smart Data schemes, and the FCA’s Open Finance roadmap sets out a path from vision to delivery through to 2030. As the ecosystem expands beyond payment accounts, Mansell argues that access to more data will not automatically produce better outcomes. Open Banking value creation, in his framing, depends on connecting data, decision-making and customer journeys across systems, channels and teams, not simply on adding more data to a fragmented architecture.
The piece was written by Mansell ahead of Open Banking Expo UK & Europe 2026, which Concentrix is supporting as an Event Partner. The event takes place on 13-14 October at the Business Design Centre in London.
