Open banking in the U.S. took root through market forces, driven by aggregators, fintechs, and evolving consumer expectations. Today, banks are gearing up for a new chapter in which data sharing will be governed by secure, standardized APIs. With the ongoing revisions to Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, creating regulatory uncertainty, financial ecosystems must increasingly align with frameworks like Financial Data Exchange (FDX). This regulatory clarity presents a timely opportunity for banks to move from reactive compliance to proactive platform leadership.
Readiness is more than ticking a compliance box; it requires a collaborative effort to build scalable infrastructure, adaptable systems, and experiences that earn user trust. The boundaries of open banking are rapidly expanding into a broader ecosystem that includes open finance and open data. From account aggregation to embedded lending and income and tax verification, real-world use cases offer customers more control, while enabling banks to deliver smarter, connected services. This also opens pathways for monetization—allowing banks to unlock new revenue streams through ecosystem partnerships, data-driven services, and embedded finance opportunities.
Let’s explore what open banking readiness entails, the operational realities of implementation, the most relevant use cases, and how technology, particularly AI, can help unlock value.
What Open Banking Readiness Looks Like
Open banking readiness extends well beyond the deployment of APIs. It encompasses how data is shared, protected, and trusted across an evolving network of partners and services.
A key part of this is dynamic consent frameworks, infrastructure capable of capturing beyond a user’s “yes,” including the scope of data access, its duration, revocation rules, and audit trails.
Next is modular architecture. Many banks still leverage legacy core systems. Instead of completely replacing them, readiness efforts focus on abstraction, introducing middleware and API gateways that allow modern services to interface seamlessly with older systems.
AI is starting to support these changes in meaningful ways. It can help identify unusual data access patterns, support consent checks, simplify compliance, and even adapt access rules based on different types of users or transactions. Beyond security and governance, AI is also improving operational efficiency across the software development lifecycle: helping generate API specifications, generate documentation, validate data schemas, create test cases, and produce synthetic data for testing. These capabilities reduce manual effort, improve accuracy, and accelerate time to market for open banking services.
Altogether, these steps make it easier for banks to move from tightly guarded ecosystems to connected platforms that support product innovation, regulatory alignment, and seamless ecosystem participation.
Challenges and Key Considerations
While the rationale for API-led open banking is clear, executing it would involve navigating real-world constraints. Wipro’s extensive work across various markets with leading financial institutions implementing open banking solutions has surfaced recurring themes that banks may want to address early on:
- Externalization: Banks must identify which data sets, products, and services can be securely externalized. At the same time, they must maintain strong risk management and governance controls to safeguard trust and compliance.
- Mapping data hierarchies: Internal product catalogs rarely match external schemas like FDX. Translating internal structures into interoperable formats takes time and coordination.
- Performance bottlenecks from legacy systems: Core banking systems are not really designed to serve real-time API calls. Without performance planning, institutions risk exposing latency or failure points to external partners.
- Ownership and accountability: Success depends on cross-functional alignment between product, compliance, technology, and risk teams, with each taking ownership of their roles.
- Developer experience as a differentiator: Sandboxes, API discoverability, documentation, test data, and portal usability play a critical role in adoption. Sans these, even the best APIs could go unused.
- Planning amid policy uncertainty: With the regulatory landscape still evolving, banks must invest in flexible architectures that won’t require rework if definitions or timelines shift.
- Monetization strategy: Open banking initiatives need to be backed by clear business models. Whether through premium APIs, partnership-based revenue sharing, or data-as-a-service offerings. Here, banks not only strive to create value, but also define how that value will be captured.
Addressing these challenges early enables banks to move from navigating complexity to creating opportunity. With the right foundations in place, open banking can evolve from a compliance exercise into a catalyst for new use cases, partnerships, and growth.
Real-World Use Cases
Across the U.S., financial services and fintechs are building and piloting real-world use cases that go far beyond compliance. The use cases listed below showcase how API-led infrastructure enables new revenue models, partnerships, and enhanced customer experiences.
Open Banking
- Account Aggregation: Letting customers view multi-bank relationships in one place and offer value added services e.g. Bill manager, Banking coach
- Payment Initiation: Enabling secure, third-party payment flows within partner apps, Smart Subscriptions and Utilities, Agile Payments
Open Finance
- Alternative Credit Scoring: Using transaction history or utility payments to serve thin-file customers
- Treasury and Accounting for SMEs: Streamlined cashflow management, automated reconciliation of payments and efficient vendor payments.
Open Data
- ESG-linked Lending: Aligning credit terms to sustainability performance
- Income and Tax Verification: Accelerating onboarding for gig workers and small businesses
AI plays a cross-cutting role here: enhancing product fitment, enabling predictive insights, and supporting risk decisions. For banks, the value lies in delivering more precise services across more embedded channels with better conversion rates.
Wipro’s Value Proposition in Open Banking
As banks modernize for open banking, Wipro brings deep experience from helping global banks navigate similar journeys.
Strategic Consulting: Wipro engages with financial institutions to achieve larger business goals with consulting-led strategies. We collaborate with banks to evaluate open banking maturity, define comprehensive API product strategies to help them expand revenue streams, accelerate innovation for better customer experience, and establish implementation roadmaps aligned with regulatory mandates and enterprise growth objectives.
Accelerators for FDX alignment: Through a suite of modular components and pre-configured templates, Wipro enables faster alignment with FDX standards, Consent Management, streamlining integration timelines, simplifying third-party certification, and expediting developer onboarding processes.
Wipro Intelligence™: is our unified suite of AI-powered platforms, solutions, and transformative offerings - empowering enterprises to scale with confidence and lead in an AI-first world. Every transformation we drive is AI-powered through Wipro Intelligence™, embedding AI where it creates true business advantage..
Global Business Landscape and ecosystem fluency: Wipro has global foresight and local execution capabilities. With delivery experience across regulatory regimes in the UK, EU, and Australia, Wipro brings proven strategies for open banking and API consent architecture, monetization models, governance models, and interoperability, adapted to the specific needs of U.S. institutions.
As the market matures, monetization is also becoming a key dimension of open banking, evident in recent moves by some banks. The opportunity lies not only in regulatory alignment but in building commercially viable platforms that support new revenue models and ecosystem collaboration.
Looking Ahead
Open banking is here. By focusing on flexible consent, scalable systems, and intentional AI use now, institutions can better handle change and quickly realize value. It’s time to move from planning to action. Speak to an expert to find out more about Wipro’s services.
