Finexer is a London-based Open Banking infrastructure company founded in 2018. Its single API gives businesses real-time bank data, instant payments, and identity verification, reducing reliance on card networks (or providing an alternative to the same), manual reconciliation, and fragmented compliance. FCA-authorised as both an AISP and PISP, Finexer is built for Scaleups & mid-market SaaS and fintech platforms that need reliable financial infrastructure without enterprise-level complexity.
Tell us about yourself?
I am a software engineer turned fintech founder. Before Finexer, I spent over 17 years building across industries, founding BulkTech to provide engineering teams across Western Europe, then working on PCI DSS-compliant card processing in the US across Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discover. That is where I saw the machinery behind card payments up close: the compliance burden, the chargeback exposure, the intermediaries extracting fees before money reaches the merchant.
Most people accept this as the cost of doing business. I could not stop thinking about how unnecessary it was.
What problem does Finexer solve?
Two problems sharing the same root.
On the data side, I watched a client’s workflow collapse because a third-party bank data feed went stale mid-project. Meanwhile, accountants I knew were still printing bank statements and reconciling transactions by hand in 2018, because no reliable alternative existed.
On the payments side, merchants described chargebacks as a tax they could not avoid: legitimate transactions reversed with no recourse, because card networks were the only option. From the beginning, reliability was non-negotiable, and for this very reason, the platform is backed by a 99% uptime SLA.
The cause was identical in both cases: no direct, reliable connection to the bank. Open Banking offered exactly that. I founded Finexer to build it properly.
What was the biggest challenge you faced?
The first challenge: Building during a period of scepticism
Founding Finexer in 2018 meant building during Open Banking’s earliest and most uncertain days.
When the CMA introduced Open Banking in January 2018, the framework was sound but the ecosystem was still finding its feet. Adoption was limited, implementations varied across banks, and businesses were cautious about trusting a technology they had little experience with. The opportunity was clear, but so was the gap between regulatory intent and real-world readiness.
Building in that environment required conviction. There were no proven playbooks, no established client base, and no guarantee the market would move at the pace we believed it would.
The second challenge: Building the technology from scratch
I built the entire platform alone during this period, writing every line without AI assistance, architecting a system that had to meet FCA standards before Finexer had a team or a single client. I made it fully config-driven so a new bank could be onboarded through configuration alone, not weeks of re-engineering, because I knew the landscape would keep changing.
The third challenge: Earning trust
Building the technology was hard. Convincing businesses to adopt something new was harder. Open Banking was still unfamiliar territory for most companies, and no amount of marketing could substitute for demonstrated reliability. Trust had to be earned client by client, through consistent delivery and performance that spoke for itself.
What is the inspiration behind Finexer?
Frustration, honestly — but frustration rooted in specific, recurring problems I kept seeing.
On the data side, a client project I was working on relied on a third-party bank data provider that kept breaking. Data would go stale or stop flowing entirely, when it should have been coming straight from the bank. Meanwhile, accountants I knew were still reconciling transactions manually from printed bank statements in 2018, because no reliable alternative existed.
On the payments side, clients described chargebacks as a cost they simply had to absorb, legitimate transactions reversed with no recourse, because card rails were the only option. PSD2 and Open Banking changed that equation. Bank-to-bank payments are irrevocable by design, cutting out chargeback risk and card network overhead entirely.
Both problems traced back to the same root: no direct, reliable connection to the bank. When Open Banking created that path, I wanted to build infrastructure that used it fully — one API covering data, payments, and verification, so businesses no longer need to manage multiple providers or navigate separate compliance obligations for each.
What is the plan for the next five years?
The next shift is agentic commerce
We are entering the era of agentic commerce. AI systems are beginning to act autonomously on behalf of businesses – paying suppliers, reconciling accounts, verifying identities – and every one of those actions requires a trusted, real-time bank connection. The infrastructure we have built at Finexer is precisely what that future needs underneath it.
The market is reaching that point
The numbers reflect how far Open Banking has come since those early days. As of March 2026, there were 17.94 million active UK Open Banking connections, showing how quickly the market has matured.
We’ve grown alongside that shift, building infrastructure that now connects businesses to most UK banks, has processed nearly 200 million API requests, and supports more than 100,000 connected bank accounts. Our API also reduces client implementation time by approximately 67%. , meaning most businesses are live significantly faster than they would be building independently.
Looking back, being named to the Sifted 100 as one of the UK’s fastest-growing startups and winning Best SEIS Investee Company at the 2026 EISA Awards mean a great deal. These recognitions reflect not only where Finexer is today, but also how far both the company and the wider industry have come since 2018.
The next chapter of Finexer
The next five years are about extending that infrastructure into Open Finance and becoming the default financial data layer for the platforms building the next generation of financial products.
How do people get involved?
Visit finexer.com, explore the API documentation, and request a sandbox. With three to five weeks of hands-on onboarding support, most platforms are up and running quickly. If you have a harder use case, bring it to us directly.
