Open Banking in the US: inside the $35 billion category rewriting who owns your financial data

A Chicago software engineer used to paste her checking-account username and password into a budgeting app and hope it did not store them. In 2026, the same engineer taps a permission screen, selects the specific accounts and data categories the app can read, and revokes access in a single click when she stops using the service. The rails behind that shift are open banking, and it is why Fortune Business Insights values the global open banking market at $35.30 billion in 2025, projected to reach $190.94 billion by 2034 at a 20.8% CAGR, with North America holding a 28.70% regional share and the US market alone projected at $9.92 billion in 2026. A parallel Precedence Research estimate pegs the 2025 market at $35.72 billion growing to $240.31 billion by 2035 at a 21.0% CAGR.

How open banking became a software category

Twenty years ago, the US retail banking industry treated customer data as a proprietary asset. A consumer’s transaction history, account balances, and bill-pay payees sat inside a core-banking system behind a set of screens that were difficult for anyone other than the bank itself to access. Screen-scraping services like Yodlee and Plaid emerged to bridge the gap, logging into customers’ banking portals on their behalf and pulling data for budgeting apps, lenders, and brokerages. The approach worked, but it was fragile, it exposed credentials, and it left banks and consumers in an uneasy arrangement.

What broke that model was a combination of API adoption, regulation, and competitive pressure. JPMorgan Chase signed an API deal with Intuit in 2017, the first of many bank-fintech data agreements. Capital One, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America each built developer portals exposing tokenized data access. Plaid pivoted from screen-scraping to API-first connectivity. Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, dormant for a decade, came alive in 2023 when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed rules giving consumers the right to authorize third-party access to their financial data. By 2026, open banking has matured from a market-led experiment into a regulated data-portability regime.

The incumbent response, running 2020 to 2025, was to treat open banking as both defensive and offensive. Banks invested in API gateways, consent dashboards, and risk-scoring for third-party access. Fintechs used the new rails to offer personal finance management, cash-flow underwriting, account-aggregation analytics, and embedded-finance experiences. By 2026, the open banking category has matured from a disruption narrative into a software-category investment thesis — the same pattern that played out in payments a decade earlier.

The open banking market in 2025

The two research houses converge on the category structure. Global open banking is a mid-$30-billion market growing at 20% to 21% per year. Banks and financial institutions are the largest end-user category. Account information sharing and payment initiation are the two dominant offering types. North America is a meaningful regional share but not dominant — Europe remains the largest regional market because the EU’s PSD2 regime is older. The US market is projected at close to $10 billion by 2026.

Five open banking workloads inside US financial firms

Open banking at a US financial firm in 2026 has consolidated around five recurring workloads.

The first is consent management and permissioning. Consumers authorize specific data categories and specific third-parties for specific durations, and banks maintain audit-grade records of every consent granted, modified, or revoked. The overlap with the regulatory reporting software US banks have adopted to turn compliance into code is structural — consent lineage follows the same audit-trail patterns regulatory reporting platforms built first.

The second is data aggregation and enrichment. Aggregators ingest raw transaction feeds from thousands of banks, normalize merchant names and categories, and expose a clean API to fintechs, lenders, and personal finance apps. The overlap with the machine learning systems US financial firms have deployed for credit-scoring and model-risk management is explicit — cash-flow underwriting models run on open-banking data streams.

The third is payment initiation. Pay-by-bank products use open banking rails to move money directly from a customer’s bank account without a card network in the middle. Merchants save interchange, customers avoid card-not-present fraud, and banks keep the customer relationship. The overlap with the pay-by-bank momentum in the broader payments category is tight.

The fourth is identity verification and fraud prevention. Open banking data — account tenure, transaction patterns, balance history — is now a first-class input into KYC checks, sanctions screening, and identity-fraud models. The overlap with the InsurTech category rewriting how insurance is sold, underwritten, and paid is structural — insurance underwriters and banks share the same identity-verification vendor stack.

The fifth is developer tooling and API gateway infrastructure. Banks have built or bought API management platforms that throttle traffic, enforce permissioning, log every call, and bill for access when applicable. The category has pulled in cloud-native infrastructure patterns from the broader software industry.

The US open banking vendor map

The US open banking vendor map splits into three layers.

At the aggregator layer, Plaid, MX, Finicity (Mastercard), Akoya, Yodlee (Envestnet), and Finicity are the major connectivity providers. Plaid dominates fintech developer mindshare. Akoya, a bank-consortium-owned network launched by Fidelity and backed by JPMorgan, Citi, and others, has grown quickly as banks looked for an alternative to screen-scraping-era vendors. Finicity’s acquisition by Mastercard signalled the strategic value of aggregation infrastructure.

At the bank API and gateway layer, core-banking platforms including FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry, and Finastra have shipped open banking modules for their bank customers. Cloud-native challengers like Mambu, Thought Machine, and 10x Banking compete for greenfield deployments. API management platforms from Apigee (Google), MuleSoft (Salesforce), Kong, and Axway power the bank-side traffic management.

At the application layer, pay-by-bank specialists like Trustly and Dwolla, personal finance platforms like Copilot and Monarch Money, cash-flow lenders like Pipe and Capchase, and account-aggregation analytics vendors like Nova Credit and Prism Data have built businesses on top of open banking rails. This layer is where most of the venture funding still flows.

What the regulators are watching in 2026

US open banking regulation is being written in real time. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Section 1033 rule, finalised in 2024 and phasing in through 2026, sets data-portability obligations for banks, defines authorized third parties, and requires consent-based access to consumer financial data. The rule is being litigated and amended, but the direction of travel is toward a regulated data-sharing regime closer to the EU’s.

The first supervisory concern is data security and liability allocation. When a consumer authorizes a third party to access her bank data and fraud subsequently occurs, who is liable? Banks, fintechs, and aggregators have each been pushing their preferred allocation of risk, and the CFPB and bank regulators are expected to continue clarifying expectations.

The second concern is consumer consent and disclosure. The CFPB has scrutinised how consent is obtained, the scope and duration of access granted, and how revocation flows work. Dark-pattern consent mechanics are a specific focus, and fintechs using third-party data face increasing documentation requirements.

The third concern is cybersecurity and operational resilience. Open banking rails introduce new data flows and new attack surfaces. Bank Service Company Act expectations, OCC heightened standards, and state insurance-style frameworks all increasingly apply to the vendor ecosystem that banks rely on for open banking infrastructure.

What it means for founders and operators

For founders, the open banking category remains one of the larger opportunity sets in financial-services software. The $35B to $36B global market is expanding faster than most adjacent categories, and the structural opportunities — pay-by-bank merchant checkout, cash-flow underwriting for underserved borrowers, embedded personal finance in non-financial products, account-switching and portability tools, and identity verification built on transaction history — remain largely unsolved at scale. Defensible startups pair deep financial-services domain expertise with modern data engineering and the consent-and-audit documentation that CFPB and bank examiners expect.

For operators at incumbent banks, credit unions, and fintechs, the cost question has shifted. Open banking investment has grown double-digits per year through 2024-2025, and CFOs are starting to push back. The institutions landing cleanly in 2026 are the ones that measured program ROI by new-product revenue, fraud-loss reduction, customer-acquisition-cost improvement, and retention gains — not by the number of pilots or partnerships launched. The institutions that ran disconnected innovation programs without business-line accountability are the ones justifying the line item to the board.

The bottom line

Open banking is the software category that rewrote who owns access to US financial data over the past decade. At $35 billion globally in 2025 and growing at 20% to 21% annually, the category is both structurally expanding and newly regulated. North America is a meaningful regional mix but not dominant — the US is still building the regulatory scaffolding that Europe adopted years earlier. Banks and financial institutions command roughly a third of end-user spending, and payment initiation and cash-flow underwriting workloads are moving from pilot to production. The firms getting the most value from open banking are the ones that treat it as strategic operating infrastructure — with product management, revenue accountability, and regulatory governance — not as an innovation-lab curiosity. In banking, as in the rest of financial-services technology, the operational-excellence plays are the ones that compound.