Open Banking payments are the fastest-growing way to pay in the UK. There were 351 million Open Banking payments in 2025, up 57% on the year, with 16.5 million active user connections by December (Open Banking Limited). The real story is the trajectory, not the scale: account-to-account payments are still a small slice of total volume, but they are growing far faster than cards.
The annual payment total, the growth rate, and how many people now have an active Open Banking connection.
Volume, growth and adoption all point the same way. The base is still modest, but the slope is steep.
| Measure | Value | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Open Banking payments | ~224m | 2024 (derived) |
| Open Banking payments | 351m | 2025 |
| Annual growth | +57% | 2024 to 2025 |
| Active user connections | 16.5m | Dec 2025 |
Open Banking is past the experiment stage but well short of the mainstream. At roughly 8% of Faster Payments volume it is a meaningful and fast-growing channel, particularly for bill payment, government services and topping up accounts, even if it is nowhere near displacing cards yet. The closely related checkout use case is covered on UK pay by bank statistics.
Open Banking is not a new clearing system. It is a regulated way to start a payment that then runs over the existing Faster Payments rail.
When you pay by bank through an Open Banking app, a regulated provider securely instructs your bank to make a Faster Payment to the recipient. The money moves over Faster Payments, the same rail behind ordinary mobile-banking transfers. What Open Banking adds is the secure, app-based way of triggering that payment without sharing your login or card details.
That is why the 351 million Open Banking payments sit inside, not alongside, the wider Faster Payments total covered on UK Faster Payments statistics. Counting them as a separate rail would double-count the same underlying transfers.
Variable Recurring Payments are the next growth lever.
VRP lets a customer pre-authorise a provider to take varying amounts within set limits, like a Direct Debit but faster and more flexible. It is the feature most likely to move Open Banking from one-off payments into recurring billing.
For the right transactions, paying by bank can be cheaper and faster to settle than cards. The trade-off is the buyer protection that cards provide and bank transfers do not.
The most misused Open Banking statistic is its "share". The 7.9% figure is a share of all Faster Payments, which is a far broader base than online retail.
Open Banking Limited publishes Open Banking as a share of Faster Payments volume (7.9% in March 2025), not as a share of online retail checkouts. Because Faster Payments includes salaries, transfers between your own accounts, bill payments and much more, that denominator is much larger than e-commerce alone. As a share of online retail specifically, Open Banking's footprint is different, and the all-Faster-Payments figure understates its checkout-specific role.
Open Banking payment volumes, growth and user connections come from Open Banking Limited's published Impact Report data, the official source for UK Open Banking adoption.
| Source | Publisher | Period covered | Type | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Banking Impact Report | Open Banking Limited | To Dec 2025 | Implementation body | 2 Jun 2026 |
The 351 million payments, the 57% growth rate and the 16.5 million connections come from Open Banking Limited's Impact Report, the official measure of UK Open Banking activity.
The 7.9% figure is reported by OBL as a share of Faster Payments volume. We label it as such rather than presenting it as a share of online retail.
The implied 2024 payment total is derived from the 2025 figure and the published growth rate, and is marked as derived.
All figures map to Open Banking Limited's Impact Report. The share figure is kept to its true denominator (Faster Payments volume), growth is never presented as a level, and the derived 2024 total is labelled. Last full review: 2 Jun 2026.