Compliance vs Value: The Two Speeds of Open Banking
Banks that treat open banking as a platform capability—not a regulatory project—move faster on innovation, customer acquisition, and revenue per customer. The difference is architectural, not technical.
The Two-Speed Problem
Average time for compliance-focused banks to launch first revenue-generating open banking use case— EY Digital Banking Survey 2024
Time to launch for banks treating open banking as a platform capability from day one— Accenture Banking Technology Report
Higher innovation velocity when open banking is central to platform vs regulatory add-on— McKinsey Platform Economics
Key Finding: The speed difference isn't about development resources—it's about where open banking sits in your architecture. Compliance projects sit outside core systems. Platform capabilities are built into them.
Why Most Banks Move at Compliance Speed
When PSD2 launched, most banks treated open banking as a regulatory obligation—build APIs to meet requirements, create security controls, pass audits, move on. This compliance-first approach made sense for risk management, but it locked open banking into a slow innovation cycle.
According to Deloitte's Banking Transformation Study, 91% of traditional banks structured open banking as a separate project with its own team, budget, and timeline. The result? APIs that meet regulatory standards but don't integrate with lending, onboarding, or payment flows.
Compliance-Speed Banks
- •Open banking managed by compliance teams
- •APIs built in isolation from core systems
- •Focus on meeting regulatory requirements
- •Long approval cycles for new use cases
- •External developer portal as main interface
Platform-Speed Banks
- •Open banking owned by product teams
- •APIs embedded in lending & onboarding flows
- •Focus on business value and customer experience
- •Rapid iteration on use cases based on data
- •Internal systems as primary API consumers
Why the Speeds Diverge
Banks that move at platform speed don't treat open banking as a separate system—they make it core infrastructure that powers multiple business capabilities simultaneously. Here's how they do it:
Ownership by Product, Not Compliance
Platform-speed banks assign open banking to product teams—lending, onboarding, payments—not regulatory teams. Each product team owns their integration and can iterate based on customer feedback without waiting for compliance approval cycles.
Example: A Nordic bank moved open banking from compliance to their lending product team. Time to launch new lending use cases dropped from 9 months to 3 weeks. Customer satisfaction increased 40% due to faster approvals.
API-First Architecture From Day One
Instead of building APIs on top of legacy systems after the fact, platform-speed banks design their core systems to be API-native. Lending, onboarding, and payment systems expose APIs as their primary interface—internally and externally.
Example: A UK challenger bank built all services as microservices with API interfaces from launch. When open banking regulations came, they were compliant on day one without building new infrastructure.
Experimentation Without Permission
Platform-speed banks set security and compliance guardrails, then let product teams experiment within those boundaries. New open banking use cases launch as experiments, scale if successful, sunset if not—without executive approval for each test.
Example: A Southeast Asian digital bank lets product managers launch open banking experiments with under 1,000 customers without approval. Successful experiments graduate to full launch in 2 weeks vs 6 months under old governance.
Learn About Process-First Thinking
Discover why open banking is about process ownership, not just API exposure, and how that changes your architecture decisions.
Bridging the Gap: Platform Capability vs Compliance Project
The difference between compliance-speed and platform-speed banks isn't resources, talent, or technology stack—it's where open banking sits in the architecture. Bolt-on projects move slowly. Core platform capabilities move fast.
According to BCG's Digital Banking Benchmark, banks that embed open banking into their core platform from the start launch new revenue-generating use cases 12x faster than banks retrofitting APIs onto legacy systems. The architecture decision made at the beginning determines innovation velocity for years.
Making the Shift: Compliance to Platform
If you're starting: Make open banking a platform layer, not a separate system
If you're mid-migration: Move ownership from compliance to product teams
If you're struggling with speed: Consolidate open banking orchestration in one place
If you want innovation: Let product teams consume open banking APIs without approval cycles
BankBuddy's platform treats open banking as core infrastructure from day one—pre-integrated into lending, onboarding, payments, and engagement flows so you can move at platform speed immediately.
Move Beyond Compliance Speed
Our platform treats open banking as core infrastructure—pre-integrated into every journey so you can innovate at speed from day one.