PSD2 was supposed to open European bank data to everyone. In practice it opened it to companies that could afford to become one. Accessing bank APIs directly requires registration as an Account Information Service Provider with a national regulator, plus eIDAS certificates — a QWAC and a QSEALC — that cost money, take months to obtain, and involve enough paperwork to deter anyone building something small. The result is that open banking in Europe is effectively available to funded startups and enterprises, brokered through aggregators that sell on quote-based enterprise contracts. An individual who wants to pull their own transaction history into a spreadsheet, or a two-person SaaS that needs bank data for one feature, has no realistic route in.
open-banking.io is built for exactly that gap. It acts as the licensed intermediary so its customers don't have to be one — connect a bank through the bank's own login flow, and accounts and transactions are available immediately through a web app, a CLI, or a server-to-server API. No certificates, no regulatory application, no onboarding call.
The architecture is the more interesting part. The encryption key is generated on the user's device and never leaves it; open-banking.io holds only the public key, which is enough to encrypt incoming data but not to read it. Bank credentials go directly to the bank and are never stored. This is a materially different posture from the established aggregators, which hold customer financial data in readable form as a matter of course — and it's a defensible answer to the obvious objection that routing your bank data through a small company is a trust problem.
The pricing signals the audience clearly: €3/month including one account, €1/month per additional account, with no credit card required to start. Set against a market where Tink, TrueLayer, and Yapily all sell through enterprise contracts, this is a segment nobody else is competing for. The supporting material points the same direction — open-source client libraries on GitHub, a command-line tool, self-hosting documentation, and a guide for Beancount, the plain-text accounting format used by a small and technical audience. Whether a sub-€10/month price point can support the compliance overhead of holding a PSD2 authorisation is the open question, but as a product it fills a real hole in European open banking.