TrueLayer

When PSD2 and the UK competition regulator's open banking order forced banks to open APIs to third parties around 2018, the practical result was as many dialects as there were banks. TrueLayer, founded in London in 2016, is one of the translators: developers code against a single model for account information and payment initiation, and the platform handles consent flows, certificates and each bank's quirks.

The emphasis has shifted from reading balances to moving money. Account-to-account payments skip card network fees and chargeback exposure, which makes them attractive to brokers, gambling sites and crypto exchanges. The flip side is that a mistaken payment has no card-style undo button — the money is simply gone.