The most-cited public benchmark for open banking completion in UK lending journeys comes from Bud: connection uptake for affordability use cases ranges from 12% to 78%, with a median of around 62%.
Our worst month in the last year was 78.4%. Our best was 87.6%. The average across 11 consecutive months is roughly 83%.
In other words, our floor sits at the industry's ceiling.
We'd like to talk about why this gap exists — because we don't think it's an accident, and we don't think it's about the tech.
The industry has been blaming the wrong thing
Walk into almost any conversation about open banking adoption and you'll hear the same set of explanations for why completion rates are stuck. The redirect flow is clunky. SCA is hostile on certain banks. Users don't understand what they're consenting to. Mobile journeys break. The list goes on.
A lot of that is true. None of it explains a 20-point gap.
The honest answer is that the industry has spent five years treating open banking completion as a tech ceiling — something the rails impose on you — when most of the lift available is actually about how you design the journey around the rails. The tech sets a floor; the journey sets the actual number. We've been pulling on that thread for a year and the data has followed.
The mechanic that changed the curve
The single biggest unlock for us was deciding to play the data back to the user mid-journey rather than treating the connection as a black box.
Here's what that looks like in practice. A user tells us they're employed. We pull their bank data, identify the likely income sources, and reflect them back. If the income we expected to see isn't there — because they only connected one account, or the salary lands in a different pot — we ask them to connect more accounts.
Two things happen at once. Completion goes up because the user feels seen instead of audited. And the data quality goes up, because the people most likely to drop out — those with fragmented financial lives — are the same people whose data is least useful when only half-captured.
That mechanic is what won us the FF Awards 2025 Open Banking Award in December. We're proud of the trophy, but the more interesting prize is the curve: the months after we shipped that experience are the months that pushed our completion rate above 86%.
Quality is the half of the story most people don't tell
Completion rates are the headline metric, but they're only useful if the data underneath them is doing real work. A 90% completion rate on shallow data still gets you a bad lending decision.
The piece of work we're proudest of on the quality side is end-of-day balance verification, cross-checked against bank statements across most of the major UK banks. It sounds like a small thing. It changes what's possible.
The default affordability question across the industry is "money in, money out." That number is easy to pull and easy to game — a few well-timed transfers between accounts will reshape it without changing anything about a person's actual financial position. The question we can now answer is different: what was in this person's account the day before payday? That's a much harder number to manipulate, and it's a much truer picture of whether someone is genuinely living within their means or quietly running on empty.
For lenders, that's the difference between an affordability check that ticks a regulatory box and one that actually predicts repayment.
Where this goes next
We've said before that open banking is our flagship product, and we mean it. The roadmap from here is about pushing on both axes at once: keeping the journey designed well enough that completion rates keep climbing, and keeping the data rich enough that what comes out the other side is genuinely decisioning-grade.
The commercial story for our customers is straightforward. If you're a bank, a building society, a credit union, a direct lender, an SME lender, a broker or a marketplace, you have the same fundamental problem: you want to say yes to more applicants without saying yes to the wrong ones. Better completion gets you data on more of the people you're considering. Better quality gets you a sharper read on each one. The combination unlocks more safe bets.
That's what we're here to do. Help our customers find more of the lending decisions they should be making — without compromising on the quality of the ones they shouldn't.
The benchmark is a starting point, not a destination
The reason we're publishing this is partly to plant a flag. The industry standard for open banking completion in lending journeys is around 62%. We've sat above 78% every month for almost a year and we don't think that's the ceiling either.
If you're building or buying open banking journeys and your numbers don't look like ours, the conversation we'd love to have isn't about whose tech is better — it's about how the journey is designed. That's where the points are.
Coming next
How we're getting to 95%.
We've set ourselves a 95% completion target. In our next post, we'll break down the specific areas of ongoing improvement — the tests we're running, the friction points we're attacking next, and the tactics we think will take us from the high 80s into the mid-90s. Keep an eye out.
Sources: Industry benchmark figures from Bud's Open Banking for Affordability — 4 Key Stats. Award: FF Awards 2025 — Credit Canary, Open Banking Award, December 2025.
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