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It's true that the 6,000 banks in Europe have different standards, but the fact that the APIs exist and work and that the regulator is enforcing the use of real APIs (as opposed to screen scraping) is worth the effort to integrate each of the banks.

I work at Nordigen and we integrated with 1,500+ banks in less than 8 months. Some APIs took hours to integrate, some took a few weeks, but the fact that it was possible at all is IMO gamechanging.

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Yeah. I used to work for a Hamburg based fintech that was one of the first to get its PSD2 license.

We still had to fall back to scraping at some points. Perhaps that’s different now.

The great think about PSD2 is that it comes with a bunch of laws and regulators are generally good at making banks compliant. An API that's not working is a non-compliant API and banks get it. PSD2 came in to force in Sept, 2019 and 2 years later all the major retail banks in all EEA countries work have fully operational APIs.

One major limitation is that PSD2 only regulates access to payment accounts, but doesn't mandate access to credit cards, investment accounts, savings accounts etc. This is why screen scraping (to everyone's dismay) is still used - to "expand" what's possible with real bank APIs.

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