Banking & Open Banking indexes 844 providers publishing 4,922 APIs on the network.
The consistent finding in this vertical: the companies that arrived after open banking regulation score better than the institutions the regulation was written for.
The cohort
| Provider | APIs | Band | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trulioo | 19 | exemplar | 80.8 |
| Plaid | 31 | exemplar | 75.2 |
| Qonto | 13 | exemplar | 73.6 |
| Highnote | 7 | exemplar | 69.9 |
| Uphold | 7 | exemplar | 68.8 |
| Pennylane | 19 | exemplar | 66.8 |
Six exemplars, none publishing more than 31 APIs. Trulioo at 80.8 is the highest score in the vertical, on 19 APIs, doing identity verification and KYC.
Compare that against Mastercard, profiled today: 249 APIs and a 49.5 composite. Thirteen times the surface area, thirty points lower.
Why the gap exists
The challengers were born with the contract as the product. Plaid, Qonto, Highnote and Pennylane have no legacy channel to protect. The API is not an adjunct to a branch network or a card scheme — it is the distribution mechanism. Everything the rubric measures is something they had to get right to have a business.
The incumbents have the regulatory obligation and the weaker publishing posture. This is the uncomfortable part. Mastercard triggers the Banking & Open Finance regulatory regime and scores 36.7 on it. The institutions carrying the heaviest supervisory burden are not the ones publishing the most complete consent, scope and data-sharing artifacts.
Small surfaces score well here, as everywhere. Seven APIs at Highnote and Uphold; both exemplar. The rubric does not reward volume, and in a regulated vertical a tight, fully-described surface is easier to govern than a sprawling one.
What has shifted
Identity moved to the top. Trulioo leading the vertical is a signal about where the hard problem now sits. Moving money is solved; proving who is moving it, across jurisdictions, is not.
Embedded finance widened the cohort. Highnote and Pennylane are not banks. They are infrastructure for companies that want to look like banks, and they now sit in the same vertical as the card networks.
The regulatory facet is doing real work. Banking is one of the verticals where the Kin Score applies a conditional regime layer, and it separates providers that publish regulated-surface artifacts from providers that merely operate under regulation. Those are not the same thing and the score now says so.
Where to start
Browse the vertical at apis.io/industries/banking/. Related verticals — Financial Services, Venture Capital & Investing, Blockchain/Crypto & Web3, and Data & Analytics — overlap heavily at the infrastructure layer.
Takeaway
4,922 APIs across 844 providers, led by a 19-API identity vendor at 80.8 while a 249-API card network sits at 49.5. In banking, the companies built after the regulation describe themselves better than the companies the regulation was aimed at.
Browse it at apis.io/industries/banking/.