Financial institutions evaluating open finance infrastructure encounter a market that has matured considerably in a short period of time. Several credible platforms now exist, each with a distinct architectural philosophy, ownership structure, and institutional fit. The choice between them is not always intuitive, and the marketing language surrounding these platforms tends to flatten distinctions that matter in practice.
Akoya and Ninth Wave represent two of the most clearly differentiated approaches to open finance connectivity for financial institutions. Both are purpose-built for banks. Both address the FDX standard, consent management, and third-party governance. Both serve serious institutions with serious requirements. The differences between them, in ownership model, deployment architecture, asset-class coverage, and commercial banking capability, are consequential and worth understanding carefully before a decision is made.
This piece examines what each platform does, how each is structured, where each fits best, and what the selection criteria look like for institutions evaluating both.
How Akoya Is Built and Who Owns It
Akoya was founded in 2020 as a spinout from Fidelity Investments and is now jointly owned by Fidelity and The Clearing House, along with eleven member banks including Bank of America, Capital One, Citi, and JPMorgan Chase. This ownership structure is central to understanding what Akoya is and how it operates.
As a bank-owned consortium network, Akoya’s incentives are aligned with the financial institutions that own it. The platform exists specifically to serve those institutions’ interests in managing open finance connectivity in a secure, FDX-aligned, credential-free manner. Its governance structure reflects that alignment. The member banks have direct influence over the platform’s direction, standards, and policies.
Akoya’s product is a network model. A financial institution that joins the Akoya network integrates once and gains access to a managed ecosystem of authorized data recipients, including fintech applications, aggregators, and data users that have been onboarded and security-reviewed by Akoya. The network currently covers more than 4,300 financial institutions and provides managed services covering third-party security reviews, data access agreement administration, policies and procedures, and developer support.
The platform’s core open finance product, the Open Finance Solution, includes a Developer Portal, Admin Console, FDX-standard APIs, a Permission Dashboard, branded API documentation and sandbox, and reporting and analytics. The Permission Dashboard is a white-labeled consumer-facing interface that allows customers to view which third-party applications have access to their account data and revoke that access at any time. This capability integrates with the institution’s existing mobile or online banking interface, preserving the institution’s brand in the customer experience.
What the Network Model Means in Practice
The network model that Akoya operates has specific implications for how a financial institution experiences open finance connectivity.
When a financial institution joins Akoya’s network, it delegates a meaningful portion of the third-party management function to the network. Akoya conducts security reviews of data recipients, administers data access agreements, and manages the operational layer of onboarding and certifying applications before they can access the network. For institutions that want to offer open finance connectivity without staffing and operating a full third-party management function internally, this managed services dimension has clear operational value.
The network also provides a collective intelligence benefit. Because Akoya’s member institutions share the same network infrastructure, security policies, and application registry, the work of evaluating and onboarding a new fintech application is shared across the network rather than repeated by each institution independently. TD Bank has publicly described Akoya as a key enabler of its customer-driven banking strategy in the US market. PNC has integrated Akoya into its PINACLE Connect platform for corporate clients. Both benefit from this collective infrastructure.
The network model also comes with a degree of architectural interdependence. The institution participates in a shared ecosystem where certain standards, policies, and application onboarding decisions are made at the network level. Institutions that want direct, bilateral relationships with specific data recipients, or that want to maintain full architectural control over every connection their customers authorize, will want to evaluate how this interdependence fits their operating model before committing.
How Ninth Wave Is Built and Who It Serves
Ninth Wave was founded in 2018, is headquartered in New York City, and operates as a direct-connect open finance platform. Its investor base includes Level Equity. The company serves financial institutions including seven of the top ten US banks and eight of the top ten US wealth management firms, supporting more than 120 million connected accounts.
Ninth Wave’s architectural model is direct-connect. The institution deploys Ninth Wave as its own open finance infrastructure and maintains direct relationships with every data recipient connecting to its customers’ accounts. Third-party applications, whether they arrive through aggregators like Plaid, MX, Yodlee, or Finicity, or through direct API connections, encounter the institution’s own governed access point. The institution remains at the center of every data-sharing relationship.
The platform’s three core products reflect this orientation. Ninth Wave Connect is the open finance API through which financial institutions share customer-permissioned data with authorized third parties. Rather than routing connections through a shared network, Connect provides a single governed integration point that the institution manages directly. Ninth Wave Direct extends this model into embedded banking, delivering the institution’s services and data directly into the ERP systems, accounting platforms, and financial management tools that commercial banking customers use to run their businesses. Ninth Wave Portal provides the governance and analytics layer, giving institutions real-time visibility into every third-party connection, monitoring traffic patterns, surfacing the Fintech Registry of connected applications, and enabling instant revocation of access at the connection level.
Ninth Wave does not store user or account data. The platform is SOC 2 Type I and Type II certified and PCI DSS compliant, built on one of the earliest commercially available FDX engines, and supports migration of screen-scraping traffic from third-party aggregators onto direct API connections.
The Ownership and Governance Dimension
Financial institutions often weigh the independence and governance structure of the vendors they select for critical infrastructure.
Akoya’s consortium ownership model means that its member banks have direct governance participation in the platform. For institutions that are themselves Akoya members or that have existing relationships with The Clearing House, this structure provides a level of institutional familiarity and alignment that independent vendors cannot replicate. The platform’s direction, standards, and policies are shaped by the banking institutions that own it.
Ninth Wave operates as an independent company with institutional investor backing. Its product roadmap is driven by market demand across a broad range of clients rather than by the governance decisions of a specific ownership group. For institutions that prefer this kind of independent vendor relationship, that structure carries its own appeal.
These are observations about structural characteristics that matter differently depending on the institution’s governance preferences, existing vendor relationships, and strategic priorities.
Asset-Class Coverage and Institutional Complexity
Both Akoya and Ninth Wave address retail deposit account connectivity, covering checking, savings, and related consumer account types as a baseline capability. The differences in coverage become more visible when institutions evaluate requirements across a broader range of account types.
Akoya’s platform covers retail banking use cases comprehensively and has been expanding its coverage of additional financial products. Its network is primarily oriented toward consumer-permissioned data sharing for the fintech application categories that make up the majority of open banking traffic, including personal finance management, account verification, lending, and payment services.
Ninth Wave’s asset-class coverage spans retail and commercial checking and savings, brokerage, 401(k), trust, loans, credit cards, and tax statements through a single integration. For institutions with wealth management or commercial banking lines of business that need open finance connectivity across all account types their customers hold, this breadth eliminates the need for separate vendor relationships or multi-phase implementations to cover the full account spectrum.
This difference in coverage reflects the different institutional profiles each platform was built to serve. Akoya’s network model is well suited to institutions whose open finance requirements center on retail banking and consumer-permissioned fintech connectivity. Ninth Wave’s direct-connect model was built for institutions with complex, multi-line businesses where the open finance requirement extends across all account types simultaneously.
The Commercial Banking and ERP Connectivity Dimension
One area where the two platforms diverge substantially is commercial banking connectivity. Ninth Wave Direct provides financial institutions with direct embedded banking capability, connecting commercial banking customers to the ERP and accounting systems those customers use to run their businesses. This covers QuickBooks, Oracle NetSuite, Sage, Xero, Quicken, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and Workday.
This capability addresses a specific commercial banking problem. A mid-market company running Oracle NetSuite expects its bank to deliver transaction data directly into the ERP, automatically, accurately, and without manual file handling. Ninth Wave’s 2025 research found that 86% of CFOs would consider switching banks to access direct open finance connectivity, with finance teams reporting savings of more than five hours per week when a direct connection is in place. Commercial banking ERP connectivity is not currently a core focus of Akoya’s network model, which is primarily oriented toward consumer-permissioned retail banking data sharing.
For institutions evaluating open finance infrastructure with commercial banking connectivity as a material requirement alongside retail banking, the presence of embedded ERP integration in one platform and not the other is a consequential differentiator.
Consent Management and the Customer Experience
Both platforms provide consumer-facing consent management tooling that allows bank customers to view their authorized third-party connections and revoke access. The implementation details differ in ways worth understanding.
Akoya’s Permission Dashboard is a white-labeled interface that integrates with the institution’s existing mobile or online banking platform. The institution presents the consent management experience under its own brand, and the dashboard is built and maintained by Akoya as part of the network’s managed services offering. Institutions that want a fully managed consent experience delivered as part of their network membership benefit from this approach.
Ninth Wave Portal provides the consent and governance layer as part of its direct-connect infrastructure. The institution manages the customer experience directly, with full visibility into every connected application through the Portal’s Fintech Registry. The Portal also extends beyond consumer consent management into real-time traffic monitoring, anomaly detection, and the AI agent governance capabilities that Ninth Wave’s Agentic Control Layer provides. This covers human-authorized application connections as well as the autonomous agents that are increasingly requesting access to financial account data.
The AI Agent Governance Layer
Both platforms are navigating the emerging challenge of AI agent access to financial data, a challenge that is reshaping what open finance infrastructure needs to do as autonomous financial agents become more prevalent.
Ninth Wave’s Agentic Control Layer extends its open finance infrastructure with identity verification, policy enforcement, orchestration, audit, and security controls designed to govern AI-powered financial interactions. The layer sits above Ninth Wave’s existing API governance infrastructure and applies to every connection type, including aggregators, fintechs, ERP platforms, treasury applications, and autonomous AI agents, through a single unified control point. Ninth Wave Compass, the platform’s AI-driven intelligence engine, underpins the detection, analysis, and response capabilities that make real-time AI agent monitoring operationally feasible.
Akoya’s network model provides a foundation for AI agent governance through its application onboarding and security review processes, which can be applied to agents as a category of data recipient. The network’s managed services infrastructure means that standards and policies for AI agent access are established at the network level and applied consistently across member institutions.
Selecting the Right Architecture
The decision between Akoya and Ninth Wave is a matching exercise, aligning the characteristics of each platform against the specific requirements, strategic priorities, and institutional profile of the bank making the decision.
Institutions that are Akoya member banks, or that have strong relationships with The Clearing House member network, have a natural alignment with Akoya’s consortium model and the collective infrastructure it provides. Institutions that prioritize a fully managed open finance network with outsourced third-party management, security reviews, and application administration will find Akoya’s managed services model operationally compelling.
Institutions that want to maintain direct, bilateral control over every open finance relationship their customers authorize, that have wealth management or commercial banking connectivity requirements extending beyond retail deposits, or that are evaluating embedded ERP integration as a material commercial banking product, will find Ninth Wave’s direct-connect architecture the more operationally complete solution for their needs.
For institutions with both sets of requirements, working with both platforms across different lines of business is a reasonable and operationally defensible outcome.
How the Selection Tends to Play Out
Selection patterns across these platforms reflect the institution’s starting point and primary use case.
Large banks with dedicated open finance teams, multi-line businesses, and complex asset-class requirements tend to evaluate Ninth Wave’s direct-connect architecture closely, because the breadth of coverage and the governance control model align with the institutional complexity they are managing. Mid-size banks that are Akoya consortium members or that have existing relationships with The Clearing House tend to evaluate Akoya’s network model first, because the managed services dimension and the consortium ownership structure align with their vendor relationship preferences.
Community banks and credit unions appear across both categories depending on their specific use cases. Institutions with significant commercial banking portfolios often find Ninth Wave’s ERP connectivity relevant even at community bank scale. Institutions whose open finance requirements center on consumer fintech connectivity often find Akoya’s managed network model the more operationally appropriate starting point.
The strategic framing matters as much as the technical evaluation. Institutions that treat open finance as a compliance project optimize for FDX alignment, consent management, and managed services that minimize internal burden. Institutions that treat open finance as a commercial opportunity look more closely at coverage breadth, embedded banking capabilities, governance tooling, and the analytics infrastructure that supports monetization as the market develops.
A bank that begins with a compliance framing frequently discovers commercial use cases once the platform is live. The platforms that serve both paths tend to prove most durable as open finance requirements evolve.
Further Reading
More detail on Akoya’s Open Finance Solution is available at akoya.com. The full range of Ninth Wave’s open finance connectivity capabilities is described at ninth-wave.com/platform. For institutions evaluating the broader competitive landscape, Ninth Wave’s review of ten open finance connectivity platforms is available at ninth-wave.com/blog.