Open Finance Report 2025: our 3 key takeaways
The Paypers, one of Europe’s leading Fintech and payments media outlets, recently released its highly anticipated Open Finance Report 2025. This 9th edition, entitled “The Growing Potentials of Open Initiatives”, offers an extensive look at the state of Open Finance worldwide. Here are our top 3 takeaways from the report.
As first explained by Vlad Macovei (Senior Editor, The Paypers), “Open Finance has become both a strategic priority and a global experiment in trust. Across continents, we see remarkable diversity in approach (from market initiatives to regulatory efforts) and a shared ambition to make financial ecosystems more connected, inclusive, and intelligent”. He also highlights that it has moved past just enabling third-party access to data: “Open Finance is about creating value by using shared data to discover new revenue models, customized financial experiences, and innovation across the financial sector”.
#1 Open Finance: Europe is at an Inflection Point
“Open Finance provides consented, regulated, and standardized data so banks, wealth managers, and Fintechs can serve customers with personalized solutions,” states Nicola Breyer (former Open Banking CEO turned Open Finance Advisor). She also describes the various Open Finance-oriented projects underway across different regions: the foundations of FiDA in the EU, the move from Open Banking to Open Finance and Smart Data in the UK, and market-led Open Banking and Open Wealth in Switzerland.
Nicola Breyer then emphasizes that “regulation alone won’t deliver value. We need schemes, digital identity, strong fraud controls, model governance, and modern cloud – plus agentic technologies that can act under supervision”. According to her, technology and AI can provide support at scale, but only if operating on reliable, permissioned data.
The expert concludes by sharing her hopes for a pragmatic, phased FIDA implementation with workable economics; the UK’s Open Finance scheme moving from design to rollout; and in Switzerland, OpenWealth and SIX bLink serving retail and wealth use cases via standardized APIs. She added: “prototype and learn, but also build security, governance, and consent management around customer expectations. Create value from the data you have. Pass FIDA and create sensible schemes. Learn from international successes. Move from defense to opportunity creation”.
#2 Powering a Stronger, Smarter Financial Future for Europe
In his article, Andres Lehtmets (Founder, InsurTech4Good.com) focuses on the proposed Financial Data Access (FiDA) framework, which “aims at bringing Europe’s financial sector into the digital age. It would set clear rights and obligations for data sharing across the sector, going beyond payment accounts to cover almost all European Union-regulated financial services, including investments, loans, crypto-assets, pensions, and insurance”. Moreover, FiDA could foster innovation and competition, ensuring the EU’s financial sector remains fit for purpose and aligned with wider EU priorities.
He then explained how the Savings and Investment Union (SIU) strategy, launched by the EC amid geopolitical instability and generational change, would be supported by FiDA. According to him, it would empower retail investors, strengthen supplementary pensions and enhance supervision and oversight.
The expert adds that the European Commission has set ambitious goals for 2024-2029: “a faster, simpler, and more united Union”. It is recent speech, it shared a clear message advocating less fragmentation, more capital for European scale-ups, stronger fairness standards, as well as great innovation capacity. As underlined by Andres Lehtmets, “FiDA is central to this vision. It is more than a data access framework: it is the foundation for delivery the SIU strategy”. Ultimately, the SIU will unlock more opportunities for consumers, financial firms, innovation, and for Europe as a whole.
#3 Open Finance in Brazil: five years of evolution and ecosystem building
As highlighted by Bruno Diniz (Managing Partner, Spiralem), Brazil was able to transform a regulatory initiative into one of the world’s most advanced financial ecosystems. It took the country 5 years to build such an ecosystem, which today counts more than 800 institutions, 70 million users and billions of monthly API calls. And from the very beginning of this initiative, Brazil aimed at “building a system that created value for all players while fostering trust, usability and innovation”.
He also underlines that governance was the cornerstone that enabled the development of Open Finance, under the strong leadership of the Central Bank of Brazil. This evolution was supported by a robust infrastructure, with tools such as Data Quality Motor and the Metrics Collection Platform now sustaining billions of API calls reliably. They notably ensure that performance can keep pace with adoption, while reinforcing trust.
It is also worth noticing that “Brazil chose from the start to broaden its scope beyond banking, incorporating insurance, pensions, foreign exchange and investments – also with early discussions around the possibility to expand further into capital markets and even into the healthcare sector. This wide reach has positioned the country not just as a regional leader but as a global benchmark for how Open Finance can be structured to maximize inclusion and innovation”.