Since PSD2, banks have been the primary providers of secure access to payment accounts. Today, the focus is moving toward what can be built on top of this — services that enable banks to generate new revenue and expand their role beyond traditional services.

Salt Edge’s latest report, Beyond compliance: premium APIs as a commercial opportunity for banks, explores how premium APIs help banks build on open banking foundations to support complex financial and treasury operations on commercial terms, often making banks invisible in daily workflows. 

The report outlines that banking is expected to fit directly into corporate processes, from SMEs that run daily operations through ERP platforms to end-users who need faster access to their bank accounts. Without deeper integrations and richer data capabilities, banks risk remaining disconnected from critical processes of firms, whilst clients continue to rely on manual operations and fragmented solutions.

Our analysis of the public developer portals at the 45 largest European banks reveals that 58% offer premium APIs, with several high-demand API product areas that address the needs of different customer segments:

• Premium payment services (22 banks, 48.9%): Banks are extending payment capabilities with business-focused services such as treasury payment initiation, payment pre-validation, corporate refunds, payment collections, and commercial recurring payments. These APIs help companies automate payment operations, reduce processing friction, and gain greater control over financial workflows.
• Premium account information services (14 banks, 31.1%): Enhanced account information capabilities provide businesses with deeper financial visibility through business account information, corporate account insights, and batch reporting. These services support more accurate financial analysis, reconciliation, and decision-making.

Beyond payment and account information services, banks are increasingly offering premium APIs in areas such as foreign exchange (13 banks, 28.9%), data verification and identity services (12 banks, 26.7%), loans and lease financing (10 banks, 22.2%) and more.

What’s behind Premium APIs

Regulation continues to provide the foundation for open banking, while leaving room for banks to develop services beyond mandatory requirements. As frameworks such as the proposed FiDA expand the scope of data sharing, premium APIs can build on this regulatory foundation to offer additional capabilities that are shaped by market demand and commercial priorities, with banks determining how these services are structured and priced.

Banks can tailor pricing to the use case and customer value, choosing pay-as-you-go for usage-driven services, subscriptions for recurring access, transaction-based fees for payment APIs, or revenue-sharing for services where banks participate in the value generated by their API. This allows banks to align API costs with usage while creating sustainable revenue streams.

Beyond open banking infrastructure

The challenge, however, is turning existing open banking infrastructure into a single, scalable API environment for both regulatory and commercial services, rather than maintaining separate layers.

This is where Salt Edge bridges the gap, with a single open finance platform that supports both regulatory and commercial APIs. Banks can extend their existing PSD2 infrastructure into premium services, avoiding a separate API stack and reducing development and operational costs. The platform connects banking services directly to corporate ERP and treasury systems using ISO 20022, enabling banks to embed payments, account data, and real-time events into existing business workflows without redirects or additional consent steps. 

“Corporate clients are already pulling bank data into their ERP systems. The only question is whether it happens through the bank’s own channels, or around them. Premium APIs are how a bank stays inside relationships it would otherwise lose visibility into.”

Victor Colta, Product Owner at Salt Edge

The full report is now available and offers a comprehensive look at how premium APIs are evolving, covering their technical capabilities, industry applications, and opportunities for financial institutions to create additional value through open banking.