PSD2 did something rare for financial regulation. It forced an entire continent of banks to open programmatic access to accounts, with the customer’s consent captured at their own bank. On paper, that levelled the field.
In practice, anyone who has shipped an open banking API integration knows the field is anything but level. Two vendors can claim the same market coverage and deliver completely different results on the same Tuesday afternoon.
PSD2 defined a right of access. It never standardised the quality of that access, and viaBanking was built in the gap that left.
Where bank connectivity actually differs
Bank connectivity is the unglamorous layer between a regulated right and a working payment. Every bank implemented its PSD2 obligations on its own stack, with its own quirks, its own maintenance windows and its own habit of changing something without notice.
That produces differences a coverage number never shows:
- Response times that vary by an order of magnitude between two banks in one country
- Consent flows that behave differently on mobile than on desktop at the same institution
- Endpoints that drift after a bank release, breaking a flow that worked yesterday
- Fields that are mandatory at one bank and absent at another, so your code needs a branch per institution
- Maintenance windows nobody publishes, discovered by your users at checkout
A vendor with a strong open banking API absorbs all of that. A vendor without it hands you a long list of supported banks and a support address. viaBanking publishes what it maintains. viaBanking treats bank connectivity as ongoing upkeep rather than a launch milestone.
What one open banking API should actually give you
The promise of a single open banking API is that your product writes one integration and stops caring which bank a customer chose. That promise holds only while somebody keeps every bank connection alive, tested and normalised into one data model.
Two things matter here, and viaBanking sees them confused constantly.
The first is reach: how many banks and EMIs an open banking API can route to. The second is upkeep: whether those connections are monitored and repaired without a ticket from you. Reach is a marketing number that every open banking API vendor can publish. Upkeep decides whether your checkout still works next quarter, and viaBanking measures itself on the second one.
There is also a layer the directive never addressed. Payment initiation through an open banking API is performed by licensed providers. Their confirmation means a payer authorised a transfer at their bank. It does not mean money arrived on the merchant’s collection account. Those are two separate events, and viaBanking exists because the gap between them is where merchants release goods against payments that later reverse.
The viaBanking platform works as a software orchestration layer across both problems. viaBanking routes payment initiation to licensed open banking API providers, and viaBanking verifies the incoming credit through read-only API connectivity to the merchant’s collection account. Regulated steps stay with the licensed partners.
The read-only part is deliberate. viaBanking reads whether a credit arrived, with no ability to operate the account or move money on it.
Merchants also keep flexibility on the account side. Many vendors wire one open banking API to a single EMI, so choosing the provider quietly chooses your bank account too. viaBanking separates those layers, so the open banking API you initiate through and the account that receives funds stay independent decisions.
The question worth asking any vendor
Before comparing bank counts, ask something else: what happens on your side when a bank changes an endpoint?
The answer separates vendors who run bank connectivity as a product from vendors who run it as a spreadsheet. One will describe monitoring, alerting and a patched adapter before you notice, which is how viaBanking runs its open banking API adapters. The other will explain that the bank is responsible. viaBanking built the platform around the first answer, because open banking coverage without upkeep degrades quietly.
Regulation gave every provider the same starting rights. What each of them built on top of those rights is the entire difference in your integration, and viaBanking is happy to be judged on that.
The viaBanking FAQ covers more of the mechanics, including the viaBanking status model and what merchants need in place on the account side.
