Expert guide: Top 3 Open banking providers for UK’s Accounting & ERP Firms

What You Will Discover:

Are your weekends consumed by manual reconciliation? Does your team spend countless hours downloading bank statements and matching transactions? Perhaps you’re watching competitors offer real-time financial insights while your firm struggles with data delays and manual processes. If you’re searching for a way to transform these challenges into opportunities, you’ve come to the right place.

Every week, accounting firms across the UK lose valuable billable hours to manual processes – time that could be spent advising clients and growing their practice. With businesses collectively losing £8.5 billion annually to these inefficiencies, the need for the right open banking solution has never been more critical. But here’s the challenge: with multiple providers claiming to offer the perfect solution, how do you choose the one that will truly transform your practice?

This guide cuts through the complexity, comparing the UK’s leading open banking providers for accounting and ERP integration. Whether you want to eliminate manual reconciliation, automate bookkeeping, or enhance your audit capabilities, we’ll help you understand which provider best aligns with your needs.

Are you new to open banking’s impact on accounting? Get our comprehensive guidebook, Open Banking Use Cases for Accounting Firms, to understand how this technology revolutionises the industry.

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Now, let’s explore how the top three providers in the UK market—Finexer, TrueLayer, and Bud—compare in implementing these essential services, helping you make an informed decision about your firm’s future.

Top 3 Open Banking Providers Compared

Feature	Finexer	TrueLayer	Bud
Coverage	Covers 99% of the UK banks	Connections across 21 countries, mostly in Europe	Covers the US and UK, with limited coverage in the EU
Data (AIS) / Payments (PIS)	Both	Both (Data services only available as an add-on)	Both, but focused on data rather than payments
PSD2 Compliance	✔️	✔️	✔️
Real-time Account Balances	✔️	✔️	✔️
Financial Data Aggregation	✔️	✔️	✔️
Data Enrichment	✔️	✔️	✔️ (Only has two fields for data enrichment)
White-label API	✔️	✔️	✔️
Bulk Payments	✔️	❌	❌
Variable Recurring Payments	✔️	✔️	❌
Webhooks	✔️	✔️	✔️

1. Finexer

📚Download Finexer’s Guidebook for SME’s & Startups

Ideal for small to medium accounting firms and fintech startups seeking an API-first open banking platform with startup-friendly pricing

Finexer’s Data Aggregation for Accounting Firms

Finexer’s approach to data aggregation transforms how accounting firms handle financial information. The platform automatically collects and consolidates data from multiple banking sources through secure APIs, reducing manual data entry time by 50-75% – saving approximately two hours daily for accounting teams.

What makes this particularly powerful is Finexer’s robust processing capabilities. Rather than simply gathering data, the system standardises information across various banks and financial institutions, ensuring consistency and compatibility with your existing accounting software. This standardisation eliminates the traditional

challenges of dealing with different bank statement formats and data structures.

Consider the impact: When clients grant access through Finexer’s secure platform, their financial data flows automatically into your systems. Transaction categorisation happens in real-time, patterns are identified automatically, and reconciliation becomes a matter of minutes rather than hours. This automated approach saves time and significantly reduces the risk of errors associated with manual data entry.

Finexer’s data aggregation capabilities create a centralised repository of financial information for firms providing audit and compliance services. This makes it easier for auditors to access and verify information, streamlining the entire audit process. The platform’s real-time nature means you’re always working with the most current financial data, enabling more accurate cash flow forecasting and strategic advisory services.

By partnering with Finexer, accounting firms can leverage enterprise-grade data aggregation without building and maintaining complex infrastructure. This allows practices to focus on what matters most: providing clients with high-value services and strategic advice.

Want to learn how we help accounting & ERP firms grow? Book a demo

Understanding Finexer’s White-Label Banking Solutions

In today’s competitive financial landscape, maintaining brand identity throughout the customer journey isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. Finexer’s white-label solution empowers accounting firms and financial institutions to deliver seamless, branded, open banking experiences that foster trust and recognition. By understanding how this comprehensive solution works, you’ll see how standard open banking services can transform into your unique branded offering.

Delivering Banking Services Under Your Brand Identity

Think of Finexer’s white-label platform as your personal brand ambassador in the digital banking space. When your clients interact with banking services through your platform, they’ll experience your brand at every step of their journey. This begins when they enter your custom domain, where they’ll see your business name in their browser’s title bar, your brand icon in their tabs, and your domain name in their address bar. This consistent branding seamlessly extends into mobile banking apps and online banking portals, ensuring your business name appears prominently during all banking interactions.

The power of this branded experience becomes evident during crucial moments, such as when clients authorise payments or grant account access. Instead of seeing generic banking interfaces, they encounter professionally branded screens that reinforce their trust in your service. Brand consistency helps build confidence and creates a more professional, cohesive user experience.

Customising the Complete User Journey

Finexer understands that every business has unique needs. That’s why their white-label solution goes beyond surface-level branding. The platform provides a dedicated environment where every aspect of the customer journey can be tailored to match your business workflow. This means you can create custom consent journeys that align perfectly with your processes, ensuring clients experience banking services exactly as you envision them.

The technical integration maintains this high level of customisation while ensuring security and compliance. Your branded interface connects directly with banking systems through secure APIs, allowing for customised data flows that meet your specific business requirements. This level of customisation ensures that whether clients are making payments, accessing account information, or granting permissions, the experience feels uniquely yours.

Ensuring Security and Regulatory Compliance

While focusing on creating a branded experience, Finexer never compromises security. Their FCA-authorised infrastructure forms the backbone of every white-label implementation, ensuring that all transactions and data transfers meet the highest regulatory standards. Every custom domain comes with valid security certificates, giving your clients the confidence that their financial information remains protected.

This commitment to security extends throughout the entire platform, with continuous updates and maintenance ensuring your branded service remains compliant with evolving regulations. This careful balance of branding and security creates a professional service that clients can trust implicitly.

The Business Impact of Branded Banking

When you implement Finexer’s white-label solution, you’re not just adding a layer of branding – you’re transforming how clients perceive and interact with your financial services. The consistent brand experience across all touchpoints strengthens client relationships and builds lasting trust. Clients appreciate the professional, seamless experience, from initiating transactions to receiving confirmations under your trusted brand.

Operational efficiency improves naturally as the platform handles the technical complexities behind the scenes. This allows your team to focus on serving clients and growing the business rather than managing technical infrastructure. The platform’s scalability ensures it grows with your business, handling anywhere from 100 to 100,000 transactions while maintaining consistent performance and uptime.

Building for the Future

As open banking continues to evolve, Finexer’s white-label platform evolves with it. Regular feature enhancements and updates ensure your branded service remains at the forefront of financial technology. The platform adapts to changing industry standards while maintaining the consistent, professional experience your clients expect.

Ready to elevate your brand in the financial services space? Discover how Finexer’s white-label solution can transform your banking services into a powerful brand experience. Contact our team to begin your journey toward branded banking excellence.

This comprehensive white-label solution represents Finexer’s commitment to helping businesses build strong, trusted brands in open banking. Combining technical excellence with brand-focused features enables firms to deliver professional, consistent, secure financial services representing their brand identity.

2.TrueLayer

📚Yapily vs TrueLayer vs Finexer

TrueLayer simplifies European open banking with basic payment processing and data access for practical needs.

TrueLayer has positioned itself as a significant player in European open banking, serving 14 countries across the continent. While their platform excels in providing real-time financial data access and payment services, recent market performance reveals important considerations for businesses evaluating long-term partnerships.

In terms of capabilities, TrueLayer offers Variable Recurring Payment (VRP) solutions, particularly for sweeping transactions. However, their platform shows limitations in commercial VRP and data enrichment, with only two fields available for transaction categorisation.

This balanced but less specialised approach may impact businesses requiring comprehensive payment automation or detailed financial analytics.

Their financial performance tells an important story. Despite tripling revenue to £12 million in 2022, TrueLayer reported a substantial £55 million loss. This significant gap between revenue and operational costs raises questions about long-term sustainability, particularly as they continue investing in market expansion.

While TrueLayer provides valuable services, including white-label and hosted solutions, for businesses seeking European payment processing capabilities, its current financial position and limited data enrichment features suggest careful consideration is needed when evaluating it as a long-term technology partner.

TrueLayer remains a notable option for businesses primarily focused on European markets and basic payment processing. However, its financial challenges and service limitations warrant thoughtful assessment in the decision-making process.

2. Bud Financial

Designed for large institutions where advanced data categorisation and financial intelligence matter more than payment processing

Bud distinguishes itself as a data intelligence platform in the open banking landscape, primarily serving the US and UK markets. Their recent expansion into the EU in July 2024 shows growth ambition, though their European coverage remains in the early stages compared to established competitors.

What sets Bud apart is its specialised focus on data analytics and intelligence. Its platform leverages sophisticated machine learning algorithms for transaction categorisation and pattern recognition, making it particularly valuable for organisations prioritising financial data insights over payment processing capabilities.

However, Bud’s payment functionality shows notable limitations. The platform currently lacks Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) and bulk payment features, which could be restrictive for businesses requiring comprehensive payment solutions. While Bud offers both white-label and hosted solutions for integration flexibility, its core strength remains in data services.

Bud presents a compelling option for companies prioritising deep transaction analysis and data categorisation over payment processing. Their machine learning-driven approach to financial data interpretation could be particularly valuable for businesses seeking to understand and act upon financial behaviour patterns.

Bud would be a suitable provider for organisations operating primarily in the US and UK markets. These organisations need sophisticated data analytics capabilities and can accommodate limited payment functionality.

Making the Smart Choice

As the UK’s financial landscape evolves, the ability to efficiently process and utilise financial data becomes crucial for accounting and ERP firms. Finexer emerges as a comprehensive financial data solution, particularly valuable for startups and SMBs seeking to automate data processing without enterprise-level investments.

Finexer’s advanced data aggregation and processing capabilities present a compelling opportunity for early-stage businesses and growing firms in the UK. Their platform seamlessly collects data from 99% of UK banks and transforms it into actionable insights, reducing manual data entry time by 50-75% and enabling real-time financial visibility. While competitors might focus on basic data access or regional coverage, Finexer’s sophisticated processing creates a complete financial ecosystem that grows with your business.

What distinguishes Finexer is its unique combination of automated data processing and scalable infrastructure – handling from 100 to 100,000 transactions with 98% uptime. While TrueLayer focuses on European coverage and Bud offers specialised categorisation for big firms, Finexer provides a comprehensive solution to growing financial firms that turns financial data into operational efficiency, making them the ideal partner for UK accounting and ERP firms ready to embrace automated financial operations.

FAQ’s