Over the past decade, banking leaders have begun digitizing and modernizing their legacy IT systems to support Open Banking requirements under the European Union’s Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), the United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB’s) Rule 1033, and other regional or national standards. However, they are only the beginning. More regulations are coming that will evolve the industry and generate an estimated annual growth of 20% or more between now and 2033.
As financial institutions update their infrastructure to support growing customer demands for “real-time everything,” they should map out an approach to achieve compliance with current standards. These institutions also need to create a foundation that allows them to adapt to new and changing market and regulatory requirements.
Current Open Banking initiatives need to have an eye on the future
Current Open Banking regulations center on secure data sharing, as customer data is the fuel that powers new, collaborative consumer offerings. In response, to comply with regulators and compete in the market, major banks are updating their enterprise systems to improve how customer data is collected, authenticated, stored, and shared. IT teams are also building catalogs of APIs that enable third parties to connect with and use a bank’s customer data, and special portals that allow third-party developers to access these APIs.
These advances bring new challenges. New financial services, such as embedded finance products and real-time payments, introduce more complexity into banking operations. As a result, IT staff now have the additional tasks of building, maintaining, and governing an institution’s ever-growing catalog of Open Banking APIs.
As banks move forward with re-architecting their systems for Open Banking, they will be continually challenged to modernize system capabilities in response to more regulations and emerging technology. For example, in 2026, the European Union’s Payment Services Directive 3 (PSD3) is expected to come into force. It will include new rules to improve fraud protection and customer rights. It will also increase competition and consumer choice by allowing non-bank payment service providers access to payment systems.
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These and future directives have the potential to completely change the way consumers pay for goods and services and could upend conventional banking and payment processes. In some cases, banks may need to show compliance with new regulations within as little as 18 months of enactment. Timelines will challenge leaders who are already managing multiple, parallel digitization and modernization projects geared toward operational efficiencies and customer experiences.
That’s why, instead of solving for each new directive and regulation as it comes online, forward-looking leaders are thinking about how to transform operations beyond ticking the boxes for compliance. They’re preparing for the future with a strategic approach to banking innovation that will help them remain competitive in the market and is centered on a resilient platform.
Prioritize these five core capabilities for strategic transformation
IT leaders committed to modernizing enterprise systems and supporting the next generation of Open Banking should think holistically about how best to capitalize on regulatory changes, in order to improve enterprise agility and scalability and expand opportunities in the marketplace. They should extend their vision from building application tools to designing adaptable, collaborative ecosystems that make it easier to co-create secure, digital solutions that provide better, value-added benefits to consumers. APIs, microservices, and cloud-based solutions will continue to be essential components of this ecosystem.
We recommend IT leaders make a holistic assessment of their enterprise operations and prioritize ways to improve competitive resilience in the following five areas.
Collaboration
In the Open Banking era, adaptability to new customer demands will require internal teams, service providers, and third-party partners to strategically collaborate on and deploy new products and services as quickly and efficiently as possible—a difficult task. Often, business logic is hidden in code, trapped in legacy systems, or is undocumented “tribal knowledge.”
The lack of visibility prevents alignment between IT and business teams and can slow time to market. IT leaders will need tools that bring end-to-end visibility and alignment to complex processes so fusion teams can quickly understand, maintain, and optimize them.
Action item
Support alignment across internal and external teams with common visual models using a standards-based notation such as BPMN and DMN. This one model approach is used across industries and easy to adopt. It allows stakeholders to build visual representations of complex processes, illustrating every interaction in the journey. It also simplifies the versioning, maintenance, optimization, and reusability of the foundational process models to preserve your intellectual property to ensure business continuity regardless of talent turnover.
This approach also supports stronger CI/CD integration, giving teams the ability to improve existing experiences and get new products to market faster without interrupting the rhythm of business.
Open design
As the term Open Banking suggests, openness is key. That means ensuring flexibility to integrate with any people, systems, or devices to maximize resources and use best-in-class solutions and partnerships to advantage. IT leaders will need to ramp up the transformation of legacy, point, and monolithic technologies to open systems that support partnerships, provide end-to-end process visibility, and help teams deliver faster.
Action item
Continue to revamp the enterprise architecture to phase out legacy systems and siloed solutions and replace them with flexible technology that is language-agnostic. This helps development teams reduce efforts by using their preferred tooling, APIs, and Connectors to build solutions that connect the people, systems, and devices that power mission-critical operations.
Composability
In this next era of Open Banking, banks will need the capability to anticipate and rapidly respond to dynamic customer demands with differentiated services. The ability to build and reuse process components in multiple ways can help banks increase speed to market and lower development costs. This is especially helpful for banks that support multiple processes (e.g., consumer, commercial) and operate in multiple regions (e.g., the US, EU, and UK).
Action item
Use a process orchestration and automation platform like Camunda to build process components once and reuse them in multiple processes to reduce efforts and speed up deployment cycles. With process orchestration as a foundational layer in the tech stack, banks can maximize existing resources and customize any workflow to fit specific needs. Process orchestration unlocks value from existing IT investments and helps banks use composable capabilities to quickly respond to changing market and regulatory requirements.
Intelligence
As AI and automation rapidly advance, banks need the ability to leverage vast amounts of financial data and analytics with integrated intelligence to deliver personalized customer experiences and optimize banking operations. Banks also need to provide regulators with transparency in their operations, especially as AI comes under greater scrutiny globally.
Action item
Include a tool in the enterprise tech stack that can orchestrate and rapidly deploy AI services and machine learning models across mission-critical business processes from end to end. It should provide visibility into how machine learning and AI are applied and provide an airtight audit trail of every action and decision for every process.
This visibility also allows banks to use AI-based analytics to uncover opportunities to continuously improve and transform banking workflows.
Scalability and resilience
With annual growth from Open Banking projected at 20% or more over the next decade, banks can stay competitive by simplifying their complex technology ecosystems to improve agility, streamline operations, and execute any process at scale. This is veryimportant for banks running processes that must comply with multiple regional standards and data differences across implementations. And, of course, high availability, security, and resilience to support digital operations is paramount.
Action item
Adopt a cloud-based workflow engine that supports an event-based architecture for low latency processes such as payments and long-running processes such as disputes or claims that can take months to complete. Ensure the engine is flexible to deploy in cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments to support experimentation with new business models and processes without limitations.
Opportunities in Open Banking are accelerating—are you tech-ready?
Open Banking is reinventing the banking industry. In response, banks must rethink their business models and enterprise systems to support the new reality. Those that do will be competitive players in a new era of banking with a value creation opportunity estimated up to $20 trillion.
Success will require new, strategic thinking, new business models, and agile go-to-market capabilities. The banks that will win in the next era of Open Banking will develop a strategic approach to delivering seamless, personalized experiences through advanced analytical decision-making, open and composable systems, robust process orchestration, and automation. Monolithic, legacy tech will be more of a blocker than ever, which is why institutions with an eye toward the future are doing the hard work now to revise enterprise architectures for agility, security, collaboration, and speed.
Today’s APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, cloud platforms, and user-friendly development tools are a start. They will help accelerate innovation, as will a growing offering of AI-based tools and services.
But to lead in the next era, banks will need a holistic view and roadmap for breaking down their operational silos and connecting and orchestrating the tools, tasks, processes, workflows, data, AI, and people needed to deliver differentiated, market-leading customer experiences over the long term.
Learn more
Lead the Open Banking revolution by delivering differentiated products and experiences with greater control and speed at enterprise scale. Camunda’s open, standards-based platform bridges business, IT, and third-party providers to collaboratively build unique, high-performance processes for the products and services that customers demand.
Whether orchestrating real-time cross-border payment workflows, offering white-labeled services to a new brand, or expanding into underserved markets, Camunda provides a foundation for customer-first innovation.
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