Every accounting platform, payroll tool, or B2B SaaS product that wants to touch a customer’s bank account eventually runs into the same wall. You either build a direct relationship with hundreds of banks yourself, which takes months and a compliance team, or you plug into a platform that has already done it. The eight companies below all sit in that second category, though they solve slightly different pieces of the puzzle, from pulling transaction data to actually moving money.
Picking the right one usually comes down to three things: which banks you actually need to reach, whether you need data, payments, or both, and how much hand-holding your engineering team wants during setup. Here’s how the main options compare.
Best for Combined Data and Payments in One Integration – Finexer
Finexer is an open banking platform built for businesses that need both account information and payment initiation without having to stitch together two separate vendors. It gives companies a single point of access to thousands of banks and bank accounts via a single API, so a platform can pull real-time data on balances and transactions and accept online payments at low fees.
That combination matters most for accounting, payroll, proptech and B2B SaaS platforms that would otherwise need one contract for data and another for payments. Running both through a single API and a single support relationship is meaningfully faster to set up than managing two vendor relationships in parallel. Technical teams get sandbox access early, and onboarding is hands-on rather than a self-serve afterthought.
Finexer also maintains direct integrations with each bank rather than reselling access from a third party, which matters if your product depends on that connection remaining stable over time. Coverage leans heavily toward UK high street, challenger, and business accounts, with transaction histories dating back several years, depending on the bank. The consent and payment flow itself carries the platform’s own branding rather than a visibly third-party redirect, and it includes re-authorization and revocation as part of the flow.
That focus makes it a strong fit for a growth-stage software company seeking a developer-first, customizable integration without the commercial complexity of enterprise-only providers.
Best for Open Banking API Infrastructure – Yapily
Yapily positions itself as an open banking API infrastructure platform, which is a more technical, infrastructure-layer framing than most consumer-facing fintech tools use. It’s built for companies that want to run their own open banking product on top of someone else’s rails rather than a packaged end-user experience.
The trade-off is that a pure infrastructure layer tends to leave more of the end-user experience for your team to design and build.
Best for European Bank Data Coverage – Tink
Tink is a European open banking platform built around one number: connections to over 6000 banks and institutions across the continent, all reachable through a single API. It focuses on enriched, categorized financial data rather than positioning itself primarily as a payments tool.
For a company operating across multiple European markets rather than concentrating on a single country, that breadth of banking connections is the whole pitch. The likely trade-off is that a platform this broad is less likely to offer the kind of deep, UK-specific account coverage that a UK-only business might get from a provider built specifically around that market.
Best for Global Payments Infrastructure – Mastercard
Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry, connecting and powering a digital economy that aims to make transactions safe, simple and accessible for people, businesses and governments. It operates at a scale most open banking specialists don’t attempt to match.
Because Mastercard’s payments infrastructure extends far beyond open banking, it suits a business that needs broad, general-purpose payment rails more than one that is looking for a specialist open banking integration with granular bank-by-bank data.
Best for Global Open Banking and Compliance – Salt Edge
Salt Edge describes its reach as connections to 5,000+ banks worldwide, combining data aggregation, open banking payments, and compliance on a single platform. That worldwide scope, rather than a regional focus, is its main differentiator.
A platform spanning that many markets and regulatory regimes at once is likely to trade some of the deep, country-specific nuance that a regionally focused provider can offer in a single market like the UK.
Best for Developer-Friendly Fintech Building Blocks – Plaid
Plaid frames its mission simply: enabling all companies to build fintech solutions. It makes it easy, safe, and reliable for people to connect their financial data to apps and services, and it’s become a common building block for fintech products that need to integrate bank connectivity quickly.
That broad, general-purpose positioning is a genuine strength for teams building a wide range of fintech products, though it also means Plaid isn’t pitched as a specialist tool for any one vertical, such as payroll or proptech.
Best for Financial Data-Driven Growth – MX Technologies
MX Technologies calls itself a financial data platform, and its pitch centers on converting data into deposits, loans, and lifetime value by helping institutions build stronger relationships through the right message at the right moment. That’s a distinctly bank-and-credit-union-facing angle rather than a developer-integration one.
That focus on financial institutions building customer relationships from data suits a bank or lender more than a SaaS platform simply looking to pull transaction data or trigger a payment.
Best for API and AI Connectivity at Scale – Kong
Kong calls itself an AI connectivity company, describing its work as the fabric of modern connectivity. It focuses on securing, governing, and scaling API, AI, MCP, and agent gateways, which puts it a layer above most of the open banking-specific names on this list.
Kong isn’t built around bank connections or financial data at all. It suits a technical team managing broad API and AI infrastructure across an organization rather than one specifically shopping for open banking connectivity.
Which One Is Right for You
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The right pick depends on what you’re actually trying to solve. If your business needs to reach banks across several European countries with one broad connection, Tink’s scale is the obvious draw. If you’re building general fintech products across many use cases, Plaid’s developer-first approach is worth a look, and Kong fits a team managing API infrastructure that goes well beyond banking. A bank or credit union chasing deposit growth from customer data is a different buyer entirely, which is where MX Technologies fits.
For a UK-focused accounting, payroll, proptech or B2B SaaS platform that needs both account data and payment initiation without managing two separate vendor relationships, Finexer is the strongest match on this list. Its single API for both AIS and PIS, direct bank integrations and white-labelled consent flow solve the specific problem those platforms run into most: getting bank connectivity live in weeks rather than months, under their own brand rather than someone else’s redirect. Teams weighing this kind of build-or-buy decision often find the same trust and interface questions come up elsewhere in fintech, which is worth keeping in mind when you’re designing financial interfaces that build user trust around whichever provider you choose.
Whatever you pick, ask two questions before signing anything: which banks does this provider connect to directly, and how long does onboarding actually take with your engineering team’s specific stack? Those two answers tend to matter more than any feature list.