Two years ago I found a new coffee shop with excellent espresso, seating in a cozy sun-trap, and friendly service. I went back again and again. 

But over time the brews went downhill and a new place opened up the street. No sun-trap and the service was rough around the edges, but the coffee was out of this world! I never looked back. 

This happens all the time. We change coffee shops, bars, brands of toothpaste and trousers without a second thought.

But banks are different. They keep us on a tight leash, throwing up all sorts of hurdles to make our data accessible to others. They're like jealous lovers, hoarding the details of our cash flow and bills, making it difficult to switch to a bank that might actually treat us like a human. 

In 2018 the EU rolled out new rules to help us take control of our own banking data and take your data with you to another service. Fast forward six years, and how far have we got? It's a mixed bag. Some banks are dragging their heels, barely lifting a finger to help us out, while others have embraced the rules with more gusto. 

At Klarna we run the world’s largest aggregator of bank account data, connecting to 15,000 banks. We can see which countries and which banks are the best and which are the worst at giving access to payment services.  

The Dutch lead the way

In general thanks to EU regulation, European banks are much, much better than they were but there is still room for improvement. To get a sense of who are the angels and who are the… not so angelic, we looked at the quality of data banks make accessible, how reliable their payment system is and how stable and user-friendly the bank’s interface is. Then we compiled the data on all the banks in each country to give an overall table of winners and runners-up. Here's how they rank: 

Dutch customers enjoy the best user experience. It’s easy to understand the steps you need to make a payment. When banks experience downtime or disruptions it is resolved quickly. 

The Finns and Dutch are the most reliable. When you make a payment you can be fairly sure it will make it through to its destination safely without being rejected by the bank. This, in turn, allows retailers to release the goods or services to a customer quickly, as they can be confident they’ll get their money, saving everyone time and money!

If you live in France, Norway, Denmark or Ireland you are most likely to have a decent user experience that supports various ways of authenticating yourself (like biometrics). Having said that, French or Norwegian banks won’t redirect you to your preferred money management or payment app directly and still ask you to go through some additional steps in their own banking environment. 

However, the best services and anti-fraud levels are available in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden or the United Kingdom where the data quality is on average higher. This includes for example data around who owns a bank account, bank account details or the transaction history - all needed to make sure no one can impersonate you and innovative providers can provide you with tailored services matching your personal needs. In the UK, almost all banks already provide over 90+ days of transaction history, allowing payment providers to better assess their risk and for you to get the best payment deal possible. 

Portugal, Luxembourg and Italy have some catching up to do. 

At the other end of the scale, consumers in Portugal, Luxembourg or Italy don’t have it so easy. Portuguese banks can take their systems offline without warning and have slow response times, making it difficult for a payment provider to offer a solid user experience. In Luxembourg, the banking interfaces are old and clunky. While in Italy, you may be waiting sometime before you are informed whether a payment has gone through or not. 

Why high quality open banking channels are important. 

• Data quality - In PSD2 it says that payment providers should at least get as much transaction history data as what the customer can see when logging-in on its own bank account. Poor or missing data around who owns a bank account, bank account details or the transaction history prevents innovative providers from offering better and safer services to consumers.
• User experience - Legacy banking environments are still lagging when it comes to supporting biometrics, making steps - especially around authentication - easy to understand or still display confusing instructions or error messages to their customers. This must be fixed to improve the banking experience to adapt to new ways of paying such as through smartphones, wearables or other mobile devices.
• Payment reliability - Despite banks’ connection to third party providers, consumers still face unexpected payment issues when choosing alternative payment providers, other than their banks. Payment providers should be able to perform a reliable check on available funds to ensure that transactions can always go ahead, which is why payment reliability which ensures that payments won’t be rejected by the bank is key. 
• Stability and support - For payment providers to make sure you get access to payment options that are safe, fast and offer the best experience, the connection to the banks we rely on - the APIs - need to present no to minimal service disruption and downtime. What we ask is that the quality of APIs are at least on par with the online bank portal, so that there only is a limited impact on the experience. 

With the PSD2 revision - PSD3 and PSR1 -, the European Union has a huge opportunity to redesign a regulatory environment that enables local fintechs to compete, innovate, and deliver maximum value for European consumers. As well as fix the existing errors that still exist in the European payment landscape. 

How? Read our 8 ways to put consumers at the heart of payments. 

Methodology

We scored the quality of API’s across more than six thousand banks in 16 different markets (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Scores rank from 1 to 4, where 4 is the highest quality possible (payment providers encounter no or minimal difficulties to offer their services) and 1 means the level of API’s is unusable. The analysis was done in Q1 2024.

We included the UK because they introduced Open Banking alongside the rest of the EU with PSD2 and continue to have an extremely strong Open Banking market.