sometimes trends sound bigger on paper than they feel in practice
Honestly, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how open banking in Europe is going to evolve next year, especially with PSD3 slowly moving closer and everyone talking about A2A payments like they’re already the new norm. I work with a small fintech team, and lately we’ve been debating whether the shift toward more standardized APIs will actually simplify integrations or just bring another round of adjustments. Curious if anyone here has seen real changes in user behavior or merchant adoption over the past few months—sometimes trends sound bigger on paper than they feel in practice.
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I get what you mean. We’ve spent the last year onboarding clients across a few EU markets, and what’s interesting is that adoption isn’t uniform at all. In the Nordics, A2A feels almost “native” already—users trust direct bank payments much more than cards. But when we tried launching something similar in Southern Europe, we kept running into skepticism: people still feel safer entering a card number than authorizing a bank pull.
What has helped us is the stricter compliance direction hinted in PSD3. If regulators push for cleaner, more consistent API behavior across banks, many friction points should disappear. For example, some banks still have clunky authentication flows that break user trust. If PSD3 forces them to tidy things up, A2A could move from a niche to a default payment path even for SMEs.
There’s a solid breakdown of the major open banking providers and what each is doing on that front here: payment solutions in Europe — might help you compare what’s practical vs. just promised in press releases. We used some of this info during our last evaluation round, and it matched closely with our on-ground experience.