Open Banking Explains Mint's Decline

Europe moved earlier on open banking, and that changed what fintech builders could actually ship. Once banks are required to expose account data through standard APIs, personal finance apps spend less time fighting broken logins and more time building budgeting, lending, payments, and advice on top. That is why the UK reached millions of active users and billions of monthly API calls, while US apps still depend more heavily on aggregators patching together inconsistent bank connections.

• In Europe, PSD2 created the legal foundation for banks to share payment account data with licensed third parties, which turned open banking from a workaround into regulated infrastructure. In practice, that made it easier for fintechs to plug into banks with permissioned access instead of relying as heavily on screen scraping.
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• The UK shows what that early push can produce at scale. Open Banking Limited reported 13.3 million active users as of March 2025, then 15 million users and 2 billion monthly API calls by July 2025, with 145 live third party providers in the ecosystem.
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• For personal finance apps like Mint, Monarch, and others, the bottleneck is often not budgeting logic but data access. Research across consumer fintech and aggregation shows apps still depend on Plaid, Finicity, MX, and bank agreements, so better open banking rules directly improve product reliability, onboarding, and retention.
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The next step is that open banking stops being a niche fintech feature and becomes baseline financial infrastructure. Europe got there first, and the US is still working through it. As standardized access spreads, the winners will be the apps that turn cleaner bank data into daily financial workflows people trust enough to pay for.