Open Finance, Open Banking & SME Lending Statistics (2026): 48+ Data Points on UK Adoption, the SME Funding Gap, and Global Market Size

16.5 million UK users are now connected to open banking, equivalent to nearly one in three adults. In 2025, the ecosystem processed 351 million payments (up 57% year-on-year) and logged 24 billion API calls. At the same time, the UK SME funding gap sits at an estimated £22 billion, with 94% of small businesses referred to a second lender rejected again: a failure of information flow, not credit risk.

We aggregated data from Open Banking Ltd, the British Business Bank, the Centre for Finance, Innovation & Technology (CFIT), the Financial Conduct Authority, UK Finance, Innovate Finance, McKinsey, and KPMG to produce the most comprehensive 2026 statistics roundup on open finance, open banking, and SME lending.

Key Takeaways

• 16.5 million UK open banking user connections were active in December 2025, a 36% year-on-year increase (Open Banking Ltd, OBL Impact Report 7, 2025)
• Open banking payments reached 351 million in 2025, up 57% on 2024 (Open Banking Ltd, OBL Impact Report 7, 2025)
• Sweeping VRP (variable recurring payments) volumes grew 98% year-on-year in 2025 (Open Banking Ltd, OBL Impact Report 7, 2025)
• The UK SME funding gap is estimated at £22 billion (CFIT, SME Finance Taskforce Report, August 2024)
• 94% of SMEs referred to a second lender are rejected again, contributing to a culture of "permanent non-borrowers" (CFIT, November 2025)
• 60% of all UK SME lending now comes from challenger and specialist banks, not the high street (British Business Bank, Small Business Finance Markets 2024/25)
• Global fintech investment rose 21% in 2025 to $53 billion across 5,918 deals; the UK reclaimed second place globally (Innovate Finance, Global FinTech Investment Report 2025)
• The global open banking market is projected to reach $59.81 billion by 2031 (Mordor Intelligence, 2026)
• 78 countries have now implemented some form of open banking regulatory framework (The Payments Association, 2025)
• The Data (Use and Access) Act received Royal Assent in 2025, laying the legal groundwork for full UK open finance
• (GOV.UK, 2025)
• The FCA has committed to publishing its Open Finance roadmap by March 2026 (FCA, Open Finance Roadmap, 2025)
• Smart data TechSprints on SME finance ran from November 2025 to February 2026, piloting open finance credit use cases (FCA, Open Finance Sprint 2025)

1. UK Open Banking Adoption & User Growth

The milestone that matters in 2025 is not the headline user count: it is what that count signals about normalisation. At 16.5 million active connections, open banking has crossed from early-adopter territory into mainstream UK financial infrastructure. The 36% year-on-year growth rate is the fastest sustained expansion the ecosystem has recorded, and it arrived without a major consumer marketing campaign. The question is no longer whether adoption continues, but what services drive the next phase: whether payment initiation or expanded data-sharing leads the way.

The 36% growth rate looks significant in isolation, but the July 2025 milestone provides the clearest indication of what scale looks like in practice. Surpassing two billion API calls in a single month means the infrastructure is being used in volume, not just connected and dormant. Each call represents a real financial action: a consumer checking their account balance through a third-party app, a lender pulling verified transaction data for a credit assessment, or a payment initiation request. The pipe is live, and it is busy.

The divergence between PIS (53% growth) and AIS (24% growth) is the most telling forward indicator in this dataset. Account information services built the initial user base by offering practical consumer tools: budgeting apps, cashback platforms, and account aggregators. Payment initiation services are where commercial value is now concentrated. As the VRP infrastructure matures and the UKPI scheme goes live, the ecosystem's weighting will continue shifting from read-access towards write-access, and the revenue model of open banking will begin to resemble payments infrastructure more than data aggregation.

The FCA's October 2025 research note on open banking confirmed that the ecosystem is functioning well at scale, with API success rates consistently above 98% across major providers. That reliability matters because businesses and lenders will not build products on unreliable data connections. Consistent performance at scale is the foundational requirement for commercial adoption, and 24 billion annual calls without material degradation demonstrates that the UK infrastructure has met it.

UK lenders integrating open finance APIs into their origination workflows can explore how live financial data feeds into deal matching on the FundingSearch lender platform.

Primary source: Open Banking Ltd, OBL Impact Report 7, 2025

2. Open Banking Payments & API Infrastructure

Payment initiation services grew at 53% year-on-year in 2025, more than double the 24% rate of account information services. That divergence is the most strategically significant signal in this dataset. Open banking built its user base on read-access: budgeting apps, credit decisioning, data aggregation. The 2025 data shows the ecosystem is now monetising through write-access: initiating payments, sweeping funds, and powering recurring transactions. Variable recurring payments, the infrastructure behind commercial pay-by-bank, nearly doubled in volume. The first live payments under the UKPI scheme, expected in Q1 2026, will extend this to commercial transactions between consumers and businesses.

Context note: The UKPI (UK Payments Innovation) scheme will enable commercial variable recurring payments from a consumer account to a third-party business, rather than just sweeping between a user's own accounts. This is the commercial infrastructure that replaces standing orders and direct debits for variable-amount billing. First live transactions were expected in Q1 2026, making this a pivotal inflection point for B2B payment initiation.

The 98% growth in sweeping VRP reflects a genuinely new financial behaviour taking hold, not just incremental adoption of an existing service. Consumers are automating their own financial management: moving excess salary to a savings account at month end, topping up an investment ISA when a balance threshold is reached, or sweeping funds between current accounts to avoid overdraft fees. The growth in sweeping VRP is a leading indicator of what commercial VRP adoption will look like once UKPI is live, because it demonstrates that consumers are willing to grant standing authorisations for variable-amount automated transfers when the benefit to them is clear.

Single domestic payments grew 52%, which is the category where open banking payments compete most directly with card payments and bank transfers for everyday transactions. A consumer choosing to pay a bill or checkout online directly from their bank account, without entering card details or using a third-party wallet, is the core use case. At 52% growth year-on-year, this segment is scaling faster than most alternative payment rails at an equivalent stage of development. The absence of interchange fees in pay-by-bank transactions is a structural cost advantage for merchants, and the 2025 volumes suggest that consumer acceptance is catching up with the commercial logic.

The year-on-year comparison shows a slight moderation from 72% growth in 2024 to 57% in 2025. This is not a deceleration in any meaningful sense at this volume; it reflects the mathematical reality that percentage growth rates compress as absolute numbers rise. The move from 130 million to 224 million payments in 2024 added 94 million transactions; the move from 224 million to 351 million in 2025 added 127 million. The absolute increment is larger in 2025 than in 2024.

Primary source: FCA, Open Banking: A Year of Progress, 2025

3. Global Open Banking & Open Finance Market Size

Market-size estimates for open banking vary widely depending on scope: cite the source as carefully as the number itself. The most conservative credible figures place the global open banking market at approximately $25 to $26 billion in 2025; higher-end projections from firms with broader definitional scope reach $42 billion. Both figures may be internally consistent; one captures API infrastructure and platform revenues, the other includes downstream financial product flows. What every credible projection agrees on is that the market at least doubles before 2030, driven by payment initiation growth, open finance expansion into insurance and mortgages, and the emergence of commercial VRP globally.

Methodology note: The figures above cannot be directly compared without reviewing each firm's scope definition. Market size estimates in this sector frequently differ by 30 to 50% between research firms, depending on whether they measure API transaction volumes, platform software revenues, or the full value of financial products accessed through open banking infrastructure. Verify methodology before citing any single figure.

The most practically useful figure for organisations comparing open banking infrastructure across markets is the APIs market estimate of $33.61 billion in 2025, because it focuses on the infrastructure layer rather than the downstream value of products built on top of it. This is the market that third-party providers, core banking vendors, and payment processors participate in directly. It provides a more stable baseline for competitive analysis than estimates that include the full product value of loans, savings accounts, and investments originated through open banking channels.

The projection of 1 billion global open finance users by 2030 (Twimbit Research, 2025) implies that the current user base needs to roughly double in under five years. That is a plausible trajectory given the pace of regulatory mandates across the EU, Brazil, Australia, and South-East Asia, but it assumes continued acceleration in markets that are still in early mandate phases. In practice, the path to the next 500 million users is considerably harder than the path to the first 500 million, because it requires engaging demographics that are less financially digitised and in jurisdictions where API quality is significantly lower than in the UK or EU.

The divergence in CAGR estimates, ranging from 14.95% to 26.3%, reflects genuine uncertainty about how quickly markets outside the UK and EU will scale from regulatory compliance into commercially active ecosystems. A country with an open banking mandate and a country with an open banking market are very different things. Buyers of market research in this space should assess whether a given firm's methodology distinguishes between the two.

Primary source: IMARC Group, Open Banking Market Size, Share, Analysis Report 2025 to 2033

4. SME Lending: The UK Funding Gap

The headline lending numbers look encouraging: gross bank lending to UK businesses hit £62 billion in 2024, growing 4.5% year-on-year, with 2025 extending that streak to eight consecutive quarters of growth. But the structural picture is considerably darker. In real terms, non-overdraft bank lending to UK SMEs is 20% below where it was a decade ago. The £22 billion funding gap identified by CFIT reflects a market where usage of external finance has declined from 50% to 43% of smaller businesses in under two years, and where 94% of businesses that seek a second lender opinion are rejected again, not because they are uncreditworthy, but because lenders cannot see what they need to see.

The shift of 60% of SME lending to challenger and specialist banks is the most structurally significant trend in UK business finance over the past five years. It represents a redistribution of market share, not simply an expansion of the total lending pool. High street banks have not exited SME lending, but they have lost their dominance in a sector they previously controlled. Challenger banks achieved this through digital-first onboarding, faster credit decisioning, more flexible product design, and a willingness to serve borrowers that high street institutions have historically underserved: in particular, smaller businesses with limited trading history or non-standard security.

The decline in external finance usage from 50% to 43% of smaller businesses between Q3 2023 and Q2 2024 is concerning precisely because it occurred during a period of improving lending volumes. The apparent paradox, that more money is being lent while fewer businesses seek finance, is explained by a concentration of lending in existing customers and larger SMEs rather than an expansion of access for smaller or newer businesses. For the 7 percentage points of businesses that stopped seeking external finance over that period, the most commonly cited reasons were the cost of credit (58%) and the inability to borrow at a reasonable rate (55%), not an absence of business need.

Eight consecutive quarters of year-on-year lending growth is an encouraging sign, but the real-terms comparison matters. Even with recent growth, lending to SMEs in 2024 was still approximately £10 billion below 2014 levels in constant prices, per CFIT's analysis of the decade-long decline. Recovery from a structural underinvestment of that magnitude takes considerably longer than a two-year growth streak implies, and the proportion of businesses actively using external finance remains well below where it was before the 2022 to 2023 rate cycle.

UK SME borrowers looking to access specialist lenders, including challenger banks, asset finance providers, and invoice finance facilities, can submit structured funding applications via FundingSearch, which matches businesses against lenders aligned to their financial profile and sector.

Primary source: British Business Bank, Small Business Finance Markets 2024/25

5. Open Finance & SME Credit Access

Smart data could unlock an estimated £5 billion in additional SME credit per year, not by relaxing credit standards but by closing the information gap that causes lenders to decline fundable businesses. The 94% repeat-rejection rate is the clearest evidence of a broken information loop: a business that does not know why it was declined cannot fix the problem; a lender that can only see historic filed accounts cannot see what is happening in the business today. Open finance data, including live cash flow, real-time receivables and payables, changes what lenders can see, and therefore what they can lend with confidence. The FCA's Smart Data TechSprint, running from November 2025 to February 2026, piloted exactly this use case, and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 provides the legislative framework to mandate it.

The 94% repeat-rejection rate is the single most important statistic in the SME credit access debate, because it demonstrates that the problem is systemic rather than individual. When 94 out of 100 businesses referred to a second lender are rejected again, the barrier is not the businesses: it is the information environment in which lending decisions are made. A lender receiving a referral has no insight into why the original application was declined, no access to real-time financial data, and no mechanism to distinguish between a business with an addressable credit issue and one with a genuinely elevated risk profile. Both look the same on a filed set of accounts.

The OakNorth example, a roughly 20% improvement in SME default prediction accuracy through open banking machine learning models, illustrates the practical difference that real-time data makes. Traditional credit assessment relies heavily on filed accounts, which are up to 18 months old at the point of use, and director credit scores, which capture personal rather than business financial behaviour. Open finance data provides a live picture: cash flow trends, recurring revenue, outstanding receivables, and payment obligations in real time. For a lender trying to assess a business with two years of trading history, the difference between these two datasets is frequently the difference between a confident approval and a precautionary rejection.

The CFIT estimate of £5 billion in unlockable annual credit is based specifically on halving the declined application rate through improved information sharing, not on expanding the total addressable credit market. This is a conservative framing. The CFIT SME Finance Taskforce action plan, targeting all 5.5 million UK SMEs, identifies the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 as the legislative vehicle that creates the legal basis for mandating smart data sharing across financial services. The FCA's commitment to publishing its open finance roadmap by March 2026 will set out the timeline and sequencing for that expansion.

Commercial finance brokers working with SME borrowers benefit directly from open finance data integration: faster application completion, verified financial data, and stronger lender matching. FundingSearch's broker platform integrates Companies House, Xero, Sage, and open finance APIs to pre-populate applications, following the same principles driving the CFIT taskforce's recommendations.

Primary source: CFIT, SME Finance Taskforce Report: Smart Data: Improving SME Lending to Drive Economic Growth, August 2024

6. Global Fintech Investment & UK Leadership

The UK reclaimed second place in global fintech investment rankings in 2025, a recovery built on payments innovation and embedded finance rather than headline valuations. Two figures circulate frequently in this space and measure different things: Innovate Finance's $53 billion covers venture capital investment across 5,918 deals; KPMG's broader $116 billion figure includes private equity and M&A transactions across 4,719 deals. Neither is wrong; they should not be combined or compared directly. McKinsey's revenue analysis provides a third, complementary lens: global fintech revenues reached approximately $650 billion in 2025, growing at roughly three times the rate of traditional banking.

The UK's return to second place globally is significant in context: the country lost that position during the 2022 to 2023 correction, when rising interest rates and a contraction in late-stage valuations hit the sector hard. The 2025 recovery was led by the payments segment, with Revolut's $3 billion secondary market transaction as the headline transaction, alongside continued investment in embedded finance infrastructure, fraud detection, and pay-by-bank technology. These are not speculative bets: they are investment in infrastructure with proven commercial demand.

The growth in AI-driven fintech investment, from $12.1 billion to $16.8 billion globally, represents one of the fastest-growing subsectors in the broader market. Notably, this capital is flowing predominantly into credit decisioning tools, fraud detection systems, and back-office automation for financial institutions, rather than consumer-facing AI products. For SME lending specifically, this investment is directly relevant: it is funding the development of the machine learning models that underpin faster, more accurate credit assessment, including the open banking-based decisioning tools that CFIT and the FCA are promoting through their smart data agenda.

The APAC decline, from $11.7 billion to $9.3 billion, reflects a combination of the broader venture capital contraction in China, regulatory headwinds in several South-East Asian markets, and a reallocation of investor attention towards AI infrastructure rather than fintech-specific applications. The region retains significant long-term potential, particularly in payments and credit across Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, but the 2025 figures represent a pause in a market that was previously growing at pace.

Primary sources: Innovate Finance, Global FinTech Investment Rises 21% in 2025 | KPMG, Pulse of Fintech H2 2025

7. Open Banking Globally: Regulation & Country Adoption

78 countries have implemented some form of open banking regulatory framework, but a mandate and a functioning ecosystem are two very different things. The UK sits in a cohort of perhaps five to ten markets where the infrastructure is genuinely mature: competitive API standards, multiple regulated third-party providers, and measurable consumer adoption approaching one in three adults. For the majority of those 78 countries, "framework" means enabling legislation and early mandate phases, not live API calls at scale. Europe leads on regulatory depth via PSD2 and the forthcoming FIDA (Financial Data Access) framework; Brazil has the largest rollout in Latin America; Australia's Consumer Data Right is expanding from banking into energy and other sectors.

Regional note: Brazil's open finance rollout is the most advanced in Latin America. Banco Central do Brasil mandated open finance in phases from 2021; by end 2024, over 60 million users had connected accounts. In the EU, PSD3 and the FIDA framework are expected to extend open banking obligations to include pensions, insurance, and investment data, moving towards the comprehensive open finance model the UK is pursuing via the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.

The EU's PSD2 compliance rate of approximately 94% of licensed banks is a useful benchmark, but it measures participation rather than quality. A bank can be technically PSD2-compliant while providing a degraded API experience that discourages third-party activity through slow response times, high error rates, or restrictive authentication requirements. The European Banking Authority's work on API performance monitoring has highlighted this gap between legal compliance and practical functionality repeatedly since 2020. It is why the FCA and JROC have invested heavily in performance standards for the UK rather than relying on participation figures as a proxy for ecosystem health.

Australia's Consumer Data Right offers the most instructive non-UK example of a well-designed open finance expansion in practice. The CDR began with banking in 2020, moved to energy in 2022, and is now extending to non-bank lenders and buy-now-pay-later providers, with first compliance obligations for those sectors beginning in mid-2026. The 90-plus accredited data recipients represent a functioning competitive ecosystem, though consumer adoption remains lower than in the UK. The difference in adoption rates is partly structural: the CDR was designed around data portability rather than payment initiation, and payment initiation is the use case that drives visible consumer benefit quickly. The UK's early focus on payment initiation has produced faster mainstream adoption as a result.

The distinction between regulatory framework and functioning ecosystem matters most when assessing commercial opportunity. Of the 78 countries with frameworks, approximately 10 to 15 have ecosystems where meaningful API volumes are being transacted by a functioning set of third-party providers. The rest are at varying stages between having published technical standards and achieving consistent compliance from their banking sectors. For organisations building on open banking infrastructure, the quality and reliability of the underlying APIs is the critical variable, not the presence of a regulatory mandate.

Primary source: The Payments Association, The State of Open Banking Regulation Worldwide in 2025

Summary: Open Finance, Open Banking & SME Lending by the Numbers

Methodology and Sources

This article aggregates statistics from primary research reports, regulatory publications, and government datasets. Every figure is cited inline with source organisation, report name, and year. Where multiple sources cite conflicting market size figures, both are reported alongside a methodology note; readers should verify scope definitions before citing any single figure in external publications.

Primary sources:

• Open Banking Ltd — OBL Impact Report 7 (2025); 2 Billion API Calls and 15 Million Users, July 2025; Open Banking in 2025: Now Part of the UK's Everyday Financial Life
• Financial Conduct Authority — Open Banking: A Year of Progress (2025); Research Note: Open Banking and Open Finance in the UK (October 2025); Open Finance Sprint 2025 Outcomes Report; Open Finance Roadmap (2025)
• British Business Bank — Small Business Finance Markets 2024/25; SME Finance Survey, Ipsos (March 2025 and March 2026); SME Intermediary Survey 2024
• UK Finance — Increased SME Lending by High Street Banks (2025); SME Lending and Deposits Data 2024 to 2025
• CFIT (Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology) — SME Finance Taskforce: Smart Data: Improving SME Lending to Drive Economic Growth (August 2024); New tech could unlock £5bn in credit annually (November 2025)
• McKinsey & Company — The Next Age of Fintech: AI, Digital Assets, and New Paths to Success (2025)
• KPMG — Pulse of Fintech H2 2025
• Innovate Finance — Global FinTech Investment Rises 21% in 2025 (press release); FinTech Investment Landscape 2025
• Mordor Intelligence — Global Open Banking Market Worth USD $59.81bn by 2031 (2026)
• IMARC Group — Open Banking Market Size, Share, Analysis Report 2025 to 2033
• The Payments Association — The State of Open Banking Regulation Worldwide in 2025
• GOV.UK — Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, Section 17

Last updated: May 2026. This page is reviewed and updated quarterly. Next scheduled update: August 2026, when the British Business Bank's Q2 2026 lending data and updated OBL API performance statistics are expected.

Recency caveats:

• CFIT's £22bn SME funding gap estimate was published in August 2024 and is the most recent comprehensive figure available; the CFIT November 2025 press release references it as current
• EU PSD2 compliance rate (94%) is from European Banking Authority 2024 data; a 2025 update is expected later this year
• Brazil open banking user data is from Banco Central do Brasil 2024 (annual publication)
• Global market size projections vary significantly by methodology and scope; verify definitions before citing

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