Open Banking Payments, 2020–2026: Progress Outside the Headlines

A dated retrospective on open banking payments from 2020 to 2026: where account-to-account initiation gained ground and what merchants should verify. This article is part of a dated retrospective series covering 2020 to 2026. It describes key trends and widely used approaches from that period; it is not a ranking, and no provider is presented as superior to another. Where a fact cannot be confirmed from an official or authoritative source, it is marked as not publicly disclosed rather than guessed.

What changed between 2020 and 2026

Open banking — regulated third-party access to bank account data and payment initiation — progressed unevenly between 2020 and 2026. The United Kingdom and parts of Europe built functioning ecosystems under regulation, while India took its own path with the account aggregator framework for data sharing. In much of Asia, account-to-account payment growth came through national instant payment systems rather than open banking frameworks as such, which is a distinction worth keeping when reading vendor marketing.

Widely used approaches

A widely used approach was pay-by-bank at checkout, where customers authorise a transfer inside their own banking app, reducing card costs and chargeback exposure for merchants. Another was the use of account verification services to reduce payout errors and fraud. A third was variable recurring payments in jurisdictions where the framework supports them, offering an alternative to card-on-file for subscriptions.

What this means for merchants in Asia

For merchants, the key question is whether pay-by-bank or account-to-account options exist for your specific markets through your provider. Verify in official documentation which banks and countries are covered, how refunds work on account-to-account payments, and what the dispute process looks like when there is no card chargeback mechanism. Coverage lists age quickly, so prefer dated official pages over any third-party summary.

How to verify the current facts

Payment facts age quickly. Fees, coverage, licensing and technical capabilities change, and any article — including this one — is a snapshot. Before acting on anything here, check the primary sources directly. The authoritative references for this topic, with their publication or update dates, are:

- Open Banking Limited (UK) — https://www.openbanking.org.uk/ (publication: ongoing) - Reserve Bank of India — account aggregator framework — https://www.rbi.org.in/ (publication: ongoing)

When you evaluate a specific provider, ask for their official documentation and check its date. If a provider does not publish a detail you need, the honest entry is that it is not publicly disclosed — treat undisclosed fields as unknowns in your comparison, not as zeros or as confirmations.

About this retrospective series

This series covers the payment topics that mattered most to Asian online businesses between 2020 and 2026. Each article is dated deliberately: it describes what changed during that window and which questions remain worth asking, rather than presenting a timeless verdict that would silently go stale. We do not rank providers, we do not publish statistics without an official source, and we do not repeat claims from competitor blogs or vendor marketing without checking them against primary documentation. Where the public record is silent on a detail, we say so. The series is maintained by our editorial desk and each piece carries the date of its most recent review, so you can judge for yourself how current the framing is. If you spot a claim that has aged badly or a source link that no longer resolves, our corrections process exists for exactly that reason, and we would rather fix a dated article than leave it quietly wrong. Accuracy compounds; so does neglect.

Related reading

- [Payment gateway directory](https://igamingsolutionasia.com/payment-gateways) - [Payment solutions category](https://igamingsolutionasia.com/category/payment-solutions) - [Provider directory](https://igamingsolutionasia.com/providers) - [Editorial hub](https://igamingsolutionasia.com/blog)

This article was prepared by the iGaming Solutions Asia Editorial Team and reviewed by the iGaming Solutions Asia Content QA Team. It contains no sponsored placements, no provider rankings and no fabricated statistics. Figures and regulatory details belong to the linked official sources, which publish the current versions.