The conversation about open finance has moved past whether banks need to participate. Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the FDX standard, PSD3 in Europe, and growing fintech demand have settled that question. The decision most financial institutions now face is choosing the right platform to build on.
The answer depends on what a bank actually needs the platform to do. Some institutions need a compliance-focused solution that satisfies regulators and replaces screen scraping. Others want a commercial offering that lets corporate clients connect their banking data directly to ERPs and accounting systems. A growing number are evaluating how to turn data sharing into a revenue line, particularly after JPMorgan Chase signaled it would charge fintechs for API access.
These goals overlap, though they require different capabilities. This piece profiles ten platforms that financial institutions are evaluating for open finance connectivity, the contexts each fits best, and the criteria that should shape the decision.
How to Evaluate an Open Finance Connectivity Platform
Before profiling individual platforms, it helps to define the criteria that matter. Marketing pages tend to flatten these distinctions. A real evaluation should weigh seven attributes.
- Regulatory alignment. Any serious platform should provide FDX-aligned APIs for US institutions and PSD2 or PSD3 alignment for European ones. Section 1033 implementation timelines remain in flux, though the technical groundwork is established. FAPI 2.0 security profiles are increasingly the baseline expectation for authorization flows.
- Asset-class breadth. Retail checking and savings are baseline offerings. More challenging coverage areas are commercial accounts, brokerage and wealth, 401(k) and trust accounts, credit cards, loans, and tax data. A platform that handles only deposit accounts will not serve a bank with wealth or commercial lines of business.
- Deployment model. Some platforms operate as networks, where one integration connects an institution to a wide ecosystem of third parties. Others operate as direct-connect platforms, where the institution maintains its own connections to specific partners. Each model carries different control, cost, and partnership implications.
- Consent and identity. Modern open finance requires consumer-facing dashboards where customers can view authorized third parties, see what data is being shared, and revoke access. The quality of these flows affects customer trust and regulatory posture.
- Monetization tooling. With JPMorgan Chase’s plans to charge fintechs for data access, the ability to measure usage by application, data type, and customer segment is becoming a strategic capability.
- Implementation services. Banks of all sizes underestimate the operational lift required to launch open finance. Vendor-managed services for third-party security reviews, data access agreement administration, and developer support reduce internal burden considerably.
- Institutional fit. A platform optimized for community banks on Fiserv cores has different strengths than one built for large commercial banks with internal API teams. The right platform depends heavily on the bank’s existing technology stack and customer base.
With those criteria in mind, here are ten platforms worth evaluating.
Akoya
Website: akoya.com
Akoya is a data access network jointly owned by Fidelity Investments, The Clearing House, and 11 of its member banks, including Bank of America, Capital One, Citi, and JPMorgan Chase. The company spun out of Fidelity in 2020 and is headquartered in Boston with around 130 employees.
The platform connects financial institutions with fintechs and aggregators through 100% API-based connections, eliminating credential sharing entirely. A single integration with Akoya gives an institution access to a growing ecosystem of authorized data recipients, with managed services covering third-party security reviews, data access agreement administration, policies and procedures, and 24/7 developer support. The company reports network coverage of more than 4,300 financial institutions.
Akoya’s product set centers on its Open Finance Solution, a white-labeled platform that includes a Developer Portal, Admin Console, FDX-standard APIs, a Permission Dashboard, branded API documentation and sandbox, and reporting and analytics. The Permission Dashboard provides consumers with a white-labeled interface that links to the institution’s mobile or online banking platform, allowing them to view authorized third-party apps, understand what data is being shared, and revoke access at any time. Optional add-on modules extend the platform for institutions looking to generate revenue, reduce fraud, or activate data intelligence.
The platform fits institutions that prefer to outsource third-party management entirely and benefit from the consortium ownership structure. 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.
MX Data Access
Website: mx.com
MX Technologies, founded in 2010 and headquartered in Lehi, Utah, is one of the largest open finance companies in North America. The company operates a data connectivity network that links over 13,000 financial institutions and fintechs, averaging more than 150 million transactions per day.
MX Data Access is the company’s open finance platform for financial institutions seeking to share data in a Section 1033-compliant manner. The platform includes FDX-compliant endpoints, consent and administrative dashboards, and tools for managing third-party application access and viewing data-sharing activity. This gives data providers visibility and control comparable to an app directory.
MX’s strengths sit in two areas. The first is data enhancement. The company’s transaction enrichment and categorization capabilities extend value beyond compliance into customer-facing analytics, financial wellness tools, and personalization features. American Express formed a data-sharing partnership with MX in late 2024, joining a long list of financial institutions that have layered MX’s enrichment on top of raw account data.
The second is footprint. MX has a particularly deep installed base among community banks, credit unions, and the digital banking providers that serve them, which makes integration paths well understood for institutions in those segments. The platform fits banks that want a data-sharing solution paired with an analytics layer they can deploy across their own digital experiences.
Ninth Wave
Website: ninth-wave.com
Ninth Wave was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in New York City. The company operates a direct-connect open finance platform serving over 2,000 financial institutions, including seven of the top ten US banks and eight of the top ten US wealth management firms. Its platform supports more than 120 million accounts.
The platform’s distinguishing characteristics sit in three areas, each of which addresses a gap that becomes visible at scale.
The first is asset-class breadth. Ninth Wave supports retail and commercial checking, savings, loans, credit cards, brokerage, 401(k), trust, and tax statements through a single integration. This makes it well suited to banks with wealth and commercial lines, where competing platforms often require multiple vendors or multi-phase implementations to cover the full account spectrum. Ninth Wave Connect serves as the foundational data-sharing API, while Ninth Wave Direct extends connectivity through native two-way integrations with the leading accounting and ERP systems used by business customers.
The second is commercial banking and ERP connectivity. Through native integrations with Intuit QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage, Xero, Microsoft Dynamics, and Workday, banks can offer corporate clients direct, permissioned access to banking data inside the systems those clients already use every day. A 2026 partnership with Backbase brings this capability to Backbase’s commercial banking customers, and a 2025 integration with Q2’s Innovation Studio extends it to Q2’s banking platform clients. A separate partnership with Narmi delivers similar capabilities to community banks and credit unions on the Narmi platform. Ninth Wave research found that 85% of CFOs would consider switching banks to access a direct connection to their ERP system, and that those with such connections reported saving over five hours a week.
The third is the Ninth Wave Portal, which provides analytics and a Fintech Registry feature that lets institutions see which third-party applications are accessing customer data, monitor usage patterns, identify suspicious activity, and identify monetization opportunities. The Portal positions banks to charge for API access where appropriate, with the visibility required to do so accurately by application, data type, and customer segment. Ninth Wave Managed Services provides operational support for institutions deploying open and embedded finance capabilities such as ERP integrations, embedded payments, and wealth data connectivity.
Ninth Wave does not store user or account data. The platform is built around one of the earliest commercially available FDX engines, supports migration of screen-scraping traffic from aggregators including Plaid, MX, Yodlee, and Finicity onto direct API connections, and aligns with Section 1033 obligations. The company’s investor base includes Level Equity.
Plaid Core Exchange and Permissions Manager
Website: plaid.com
Plaid, founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, is the largest consumer-side data aggregator in the United States, powering data connectivity for over 7,000 fintech apps across more than 12,000 financial institutions. In recent years, the company has built a parallel set of products on the bank side of its business.
Core Exchange is Plaid’s FDX-aligned API for data sharing, and Permissions Manager provides real-time visibility into customer connections and authorizations. Together, they let financial institutions formalize and govern the consumer-permissioned data traffic that already flows through Plaid’s network.
Plaid is a logical choice for many banks. A large share of consumer fintech connections already route through Plaid. Adopting Core Exchange formalizes those connections under FDX standards and gives the institution governance over traffic that would otherwise occur through screen scraping or other less controlled methods. The App Directory feature provides app-level insights including names, logos, categories, connection counts, and live dates for thousands of apps on the Plaid network.
This positioning makes Plaid Core Exchange a practical choice for institutions whose customers heavily use Plaid-powered apps and who want to consolidate that traffic onto a managed API path with consistent oversight.
Finicity (Mastercard)
Website: mastercard.com
Finicity now operates as a subsidiary of Mastercard, offering an open finance platform for financial institutions alongside its data recipient business. The platform provides FDX-aligned APIs, consent management, and integration with Mastercard’s broader data services portfolio, which includes identity verification, fraud prevention, and cash flow analytics.
The platform benefits from Mastercard’s existing relationships with financial institutions and from the company’s investments across the data services value chain. It is FDX-certified and supports use cases ranging from account verification and credit decisioning to lending and personal financial management.
The platform tends to fit institutions that already work with Mastercard on cards or related services and want to extend that relationship into open finance, as well as institutions that value the integration between data sharing, identity, and fraud prevention as a single bundled capability.
Sensedia Open Banking
Website: sensedia.com
Sensedia is an API platform vendor with offices in North America, Europe, and Latin America. The company’s open banking solution provides a turnkey FDX implementation built on its broader API management platform.
Sensedia positions itself around direct connectivity, allowing financial institutions to expose APIs to third parties without routing through an intermediary network. The platform’s strengths include a mature API management foundation, full support for the FDX specification, and consulting services that cover API design, implementation, security certification, consent management, and sandbox testing. The company has developed particular expertise in Latin American open banking deployments and has carried that experience into its North American FDX work.
The platform fits institutions that want full control over their open finance architecture, prefer point-to-point integrations with named partners, and value the option to bypass intermediary networks for direct relationships with major fintechs and aggregators.
Axway Open Banking
Website: axway.com
Axway, headquartered in Phoenix and Paris, is a publicly traded API management vendor with a long history serving large banks. The company’s open banking accelerator is built on its Amplify API management platform and provides coverage for FDX, PSD2, UK Open Banking, and Australia’s Consumer Data Right specifications in a single product.
The multi-regulation coverage is the platform’s primary differentiator. Banks operating across jurisdictions, or institutions anticipating expansion into new markets, can manage regulatory variants without adopting separate platforms. Axway also benefits from a substantial installed base in API management more broadly, which simplifies adoption for institutions already using its tooling for other integration use cases.
Axway fits large banks with multi-jurisdictional footprints and institutions that prefer to consolidate open banking onto an API management platform they already operate.
Salt Edge Open Banking Compliance
Website: saltedge.com
Salt Edge, headquartered in Toronto, operates an open banking compliance solution focused primarily on European, UK, and emerging-market institutions. The platform provides PSD2-compliant APIs, a developer portal, sandbox environment, and consent management tooling, and the company has expanded into FDX support to serve North American institutions.
Salt Edge reports connectivity to over 5,000 financial institutions worldwide, which gives it some of the broadest geographic coverage in the category. The compliance solution is paired with Salt Edge’s data aggregation business, allowing institutions to operate on both sides of open banking through a single vendor relationship.
The platform fits institutions operating in jurisdictions with regulatory open banking mandates, banks with multi-country operations in Europe and emerging markets, and institutions that need a turnkey compliance hub rather than a bespoke build.
Fiserv Communicator Open and FIS Open Access
Websites: fiserv.com and fisglobal.com
Fiserv and FIS, the two largest US core banking providers, each offer bundled open finance modules for their respective core platforms. These products provide FDX-aligned APIs and integration with the institution’s existing core systems.
The strategic rationale for these offerings is integration depth. For institutions already running on Fiserv or FIS cores, the bundled module typically requires less custom integration work than a third-party platform and tends to come with pre-existing contractual relationships that simplify procurement. Both vendors have invested in expanding the reach of their open finance offerings, and FIS has been particularly active in promoting accessible open banking for its mid-market and community bank customer base.
These solutions are practical choices for community and mid-size banks that prioritize implementation speed and core-vendor consolidation. The trade-off is that the open finance feature roadmap is tied to the core provider’s broader product priorities and release cycles.
Build-Your-Own on API Management Platforms
Websites: cloud.google.com/apigee, mulesoft.com, openbankproject.com
A subset of larger banks build their open finance platform internally on top of general-purpose API management products such as Google Apigee, MuleSoft, or IBM API Connect. The Open Bank Project, an open source RESTful API platform for banks that supports accounts, transactions, counterparties, transfers, and more, provides a starting framework for institutions taking this path.
This approach gives banks complete architectural ownership and avoids ongoing platform licensing fees. It also requires meaningful internal investment in FDX implementation, consent management, third-party onboarding workflows, developer portals, and the operational layer of running an open finance program. Banks that choose this path typically have substantial internal API teams, a strategic preference for owning the full stack, and existing infrastructure investments that they want to extend rather than replace.
How Banks Are Choosing
The selection patterns across these platforms vary based on three key factors.
The first is institution profile. Large banks with significant commercial and wealth lines tend to evaluate Ninth Wave, Akoya, and build-your-own approaches most closely, because the asset-class breadth and governance requirements at this scale are substantial. Mid-size and community banks more often evaluate MX, Finicity, and the bundled core-vendor modules, where implementation simplicity carries more weight.
The second is the data-sharing posture. Institutions that want network effects and outsourced third-party management gravitate toward network platforms such as Akoya, Plaid Core Exchange, and Finicity. Institutions that want direct point-to-point connections with named partners, with the institution remaining at the center of every relationship, gravitate toward Ninth Wave, Sensedia, Axway, and build-your-own platforms.
The third is the strategic intent. Institutions framing open finance as a compliance project tend to optimize for FDX-aligned APIs, consent management, and managed services that minimize internal burden. Institutions framing it as a commercial opportunity look more closely at monetization tooling, commercial banking integrations with ERPs and accounting systems, and analytics that surface revenue opportunities.
These framings influence each other. A bank that starts with compliance often discovers commercial use cases once the platform is live, and a bank that starts with monetization quickly runs into the same compliance requirements. The platforms that handle both paths well tend to be the ones with deeper asset-class coverage and more mature analytics layers.
Operational Realities to Plan For
Selecting a platform is the first step; however, operational realities tend to surface during implementation and merit early planning.
Third-party onboarding takes longer than most banks expect. Each new fintech or aggregator partner requires a security review, a data access agreement, and ongoing monitoring. Platforms that bundle these as managed services compress the timeline considerably. Institutions that handle onboarding internally need to staff for it appropriately.
Consent management is more nuanced than regulations alone suggest. Customers expect granular control, easy revocation, and clear visibility into which applications hold which permissions. Mature consent dashboards reduce support call volume and customer friction. Underbuilt ones generate complaints.
Monetization frameworks are still developing. The JPMorgan move opened a conversation that most banks have not yet resolved. Platforms with detailed analytics on application-level usage, data-type usage, and customer-segment usage give banks the foundation to set pricing intelligently as the model matures.
Wealth and commercial use cases often surface late in the planning process. A bank that scopes open finance only for retail deposits frequently discovers, after launch, that wealth management clients and commercial CFOs want similar capabilities. Platforms that cover these asset classes from day one avoid expensive expansion projects later.
In Closing
Open finance has moved from regulatory anticipation to operational priority. The banks that lead will be those that treat it as infrastructure with strategic implications, choosing a platform that is capable of supporting compliance, customer experience, commercial banking, wealth management, and eventually monetization through a single platform.
Ninth Wave focuses on exactly that intersection. Its platform supports the full range of asset classes that large banks and wealth managers actually run, integrates directly with the ERP and accounting systems commercial customers use every day, and provides the analytics layer institutions need to manage and monetize their open finance ecosystems. For institutions evaluating their open finance posture, the practical question is which platform fits the bank you are today and the bank you intend to become.