In 2025, only 5% of online consumer credits rely on open banking. An surprisingly low figure for a technology available for more than a decade… and which nevertheless promised to revolutionize credit granting.
Why such a gap between promise and reality? And above all: is it finally starting to change? Analysis with QuickSign.
What is open banking?
Open banking allows an individual to share access to their bank account with a trusted third party, such as a lending institution. This authorization provides the ability to view account transactions, verify income, assess creditworthiness, or even initiate a payment directly from the account.
In other words, all critical actions necessary for analyzing an online consumer credit file can be automated and secured via open banking. On paper, it is a small revolution.
Huge potential… still largely untapped
In practice, the vast majority of financial information is still collected the old-fashioned way: the user uploads documents, data is entered manually, then verified by a human operator. Result: several minutes of processing, whereas open banking would allow processing in a few seconds.
So on one hand, we have a technology capable of streamlining the experience and making checks more reliable, and on the other, an adoption that remains marginal.
Why does open banking remain underutilized?
Three main obstacles explain this delay:
- Lack of user trust: in France, only 42% of customers say they are ready to share access to their bank account for a credit application. A persistent mistrust, inherited from a very personal – almost intimate – relationship with one’s banking data.
- Bank API quality remains very uneven: the lack of standardization among banks makes data access poorly harmonized, and therefore difficult to exploit in an automated manner.
- Data interpretation can still be improved: a one-off Social Security reimbursement, for example, can be misidentified as regular income by a poorly trained engine, skewing the creditworthiness analysis.
But things are changing. Fast.
These obstacles, long-standing roadblocks, are now giving way.
Biometric authentication now offers a level of security far superior to the traditional username/password combination. For its part, PSD3, the new European payment directive, will force banks to improve the quality and openness of their APIs.
Above all, next-generation analysis engines, such as those developed by QuickSign, are now capable of prioritizing data, identifying abnormal flows or non-recurring income, and contextualizing information to avoid interpretation errors.
Instant credit: we are almost there
Thanks to these advancements, instant consumer credit is finally becoming an operational reality. More reliable, faster, and more transparent. But for it to become a standard – and not an exception – one last hurdle must be cleared: that of industrialization.
The 2025 challenge: scaling up
The technology is ready. Usage is starting to take off.
But for open banking to truly transform credit journeys, the model must now be made scalable, robust, and interoperable.
“The revolutionary promise of open banking is to automatically retrieve and validate data to grant credit instantly. It’s the dream.”
Written by Nicolas G.
