The UK’s open banking infrastructure has crossed two cumulative thresholds: more than one billion Open Banking payments and more than 100 billion API calls have now been recorded across the nine largest high street banks, collectively known as the CMA9, since the regime launched over eight years ago.
Open Banking Limited (OBL), the entity that oversees the framework mandated by the Competition and Markets Authority, published the figures on 28 July 2026 alongside its June 2026 performance data.
What the June numbers show
Monthly API traffic reached a new high of 2.81 billion calls in June, up 4.4% on the prior month. Total payment volumes held at 40.16 million for the month, though the composition shifted: Single Domestic Payments fell 1.2% to 32.43 million, while Sweeping Variable Recurring Payments rose 6.7% to 7.73 million. The operational picture was positive: average response time improved to 349 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds faster than the previous reporting period, and weighted availability across the CMA9 stood at 99.80%.
User connections registered a 4.2% monthly decline to 18.81 million, which OBL did not comment on directly. That metric can reflect churn in active third-party provider relationships or re-consent cycles, and its movement in the opposite direction to API traffic is worth watching.
Henk Van Hulle, chief executive of Open Banking Limited, said the milestones reinforce “the UK’s position as a global leader in Open Banking” and demonstrate “an ecosystem that continues to scale in both volume and capability.”
VRPs and the road to Open Finance
The acceleration in Variable Recurring Payments is the detail most likely to interest commercial operators. VRPs allow a third party to initiate a series of payments within parameters agreed upfront by the account holder, making them better suited than one-off payments to subscription billing, savings automation and utility sweeping. The commercial VRP market, extending the model beyond the original sweeping use case between a customer’s own accounts, has been under development for some time, with several Payment Initiation Service Providers and banks trialling frameworks. Sustained month-on-month growth suggests adoption is moving past the pilot stage.
The broader regulatory context matters here. HM Treasury’s ongoing work on the future of open banking and the proposed consolidation of oversight within a new joint regulatory committee sits alongside the Payment Systems Regulator‘s ambitions for a commercially sustainable open banking ecosystem. OBL’s role itself is subject to transition as the regime moves from a CMA-mandated structure toward a longer-term governance model. The pace at which that transition completes will shape how quickly new standards, including those needed for full Open Finance covering mortgages, investments and pensions data, can be implemented.
Internationally, the UK’s cumulative figures land at a moment when comparable regimes in the EU (under PSD2 and the forthcoming PSD3), Brazil, Australia and India are all generating their own traffic benchmarks. The UK retains a first-mover advantage in payment initiation relative to much of Europe, but the gap in user-connection penetration compared with some markets is a longer-term question for the ecosystem.
The next milestones OBL is likely to report against are the commercial VRP rollout trajectory and progress toward the new governance arrangements expected later in 2026.
