Open banking started as a domestic phenomenon. PSD2 forced European banks to open their APIs to licensed third parties within the EU. The UK's Open Banking Implementation Entity mandated API standards that transformed how businesses and consumers access financial data and initiate payments domestically. Australia's Consumer Data Right extended the same logic to financial services. These were significant regulatory achievements, but they were fundamentally national in scope.
The next chapter is cross-border. As domestic open banking frameworks mature, the attention of regulators, technologists, and payment infrastructure companies is shifting to a harder and more valuable problem: connecting open banking ecosystems across country borders. The potential is enormous. The challenges are real. And the companies that navigate them successfully will be positioned at the center of a fundamental shift in global money movement.
Why Cross-Border Open Banking Is Hard
Domestic open banking is hard enough. It requires standardized API specifications, security frameworks, licensing regimes for third-party providers, and consumer consent mechanisms. Getting these elements right within a single regulatory jurisdiction with a single national authority is a decade-long project in most countries.
Cross-border open banking multiplies this complexity. Different countries use different API standards — the UK's Open Banking Standard, the Berlin Group NextGenPSD2 specification, and the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) standard in North America are not directly interoperable. Legal frameworks for data sharing and payment initiation across borders vary. Consent models that satisfy regulatory requirements in one country may not meet the requirements of another. And the liability frameworks for cross-border payment errors are significantly less mature than domestic equivalents.
The Emerging Interoperability Projects
Despite these challenges, concrete progress is being made on the infrastructure needed for cross-border open banking. Several initiatives deserve attention:
- Project Nexus (BIS Innovation Hub) — a multilateral framework for connecting national fast payment systems, enabling cross-border instant payments that use domestic rails on both ends of the corridor. Nexus has demonstrated proof-of-concept connectivity between Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand's instant payment systems, and is expanding to additional ASEAN members.
- G20 Cross-Border Payments Roadmap — a set of policy commitments from G20 members to reduce the cost, speed, transparency, and access barriers in cross-border payments by 2027. The roadmap explicitly calls for interlinking domestic instant payment systems as a priority action.
- European Payments Initiative (EPI) — a pan-European initiative to create a unified payment solution covering EU member states, aiming to provide a European alternative to non-EU card networks for both domestic and intra-EU payments.
- SWIFT gpi (Global Payments Innovation) — an enhancement to SWIFT messaging that delivers same-day settlement for most corridors, full payment tracking, and end-to-end fee transparency. While not open banking in the strict regulatory sense, gpi brings some of the same transparency benefits to correspondent banking flows.
Open Finance: The Broader Vision
Looking beyond payments, the concept of open finance extends the open banking model to cover the full scope of a customer's financial life — investments, insurance, pensions, and credit products, not just bank accounts. Open finance would allow, for example, a business treasury management platform to access data across all of a company's financial accounts globally through a unified API layer, regardless of which banks, brokers, or insurers hold those accounts.
This vision is farther from realization than open banking for payments, but it is influencing regulatory planning in multiple markets. The EU's Financial Data Access (FIDA) regulation is moving open finance principles into law. Brazil's open finance framework is already among the most advanced globally. These developments set the direction even if the full vision remains years away.
Implications for Businesses
For businesses operating internationally, the trajectory of open banking and open finance has practical implications for how they should build their payment and treasury infrastructure today:
- Prioritize infrastructure partners with API-first architectures that can adapt as open banking standards evolve, rather than legacy providers locked into fixed integration patterns
- Ensure your payment provider has direct participation in or connectivity to the instant payment rails relevant to your key corridors
- Build data infrastructure that can aggregate and reconcile payment data across multiple currencies and accounts — the open finance vision requires clean data foundations
- Stay informed on regulatory developments in your key operating markets, as open banking obligations may expand to cover services your business currently provides
Paymonx is designed for this future. PayAPI connects to local payment rails in supported markets and is architected to incorporate new open banking connectivity as interoperability standards mature. PayEmbed provides the platform layer that allows businesses to offer their users financial experiences built on open infrastructure. As the open banking frontier expands from domestic to cross-border, the businesses and platforms built on modern infrastructure will be first to benefit.