Eight years on from powering the UK’s first consumer Open Banking payment, the team at Moneyhub have been reflecting on just how many ways the technology is now being used.
Having spoken to hundreds of fintechs and institutions annually about their ideas and the platforms they’re building, we’re sharing five of the most exciting Open Banking use cases we’ve seen in 2026:
- Automatic savings with VRPs
- Boost credit scoring with rental payment history
- Sole trader tax return efficiency
- Increased loan approvals without increasing lending risk
- Spotting external consolidation risk for pension firms
1. Grow savings deposits through seamless payments experiences
One of the most exciting use cases that Moneyhub has powered in the last year has been facilitating seamless Open Banking me-to-me payments from a user’s current accounts to their savings. We partnered with Paragon Bank, who launched their digital savings app, Spring, to achieve over £1 billion in deposits within just one year of launch.
How it works:
- The customer connects their funding accounts during the onboarding experience to overcome the traditional friction points, such as manual data entry for each and every savings payment. Paragon has turned what used to be a daunting and long-winded task, including signing up, opening a new savings account and linking a current account, into a journey that most customers now complete in under ten minutes.
- The connected ‘funding’ accounts allow the customer to view external balances, ensuring they have the visibility to confidently sweep funds into savings accounts
- The customer chooses to set up ongoing, rules-based savings through VRPs or regular pay-by-bank deposits. Two-thirds of all deposits are made via Open Banking, bypassing the need for manual bank transfers.
This use case worked for a few key reasons. Firstly, the Paragon team were incredibly intentional about developing a seamless experience, with Spring making depositing spare cash into savings easy, safe and fast. With a 4.9 Trustpilot score, customers clearly agree, praising the ease of depositing through Open Banking.
The Paragon team also adopted some of the newest technology before much of the market. VRPs (also known as Smart Payments) are an innovative payment method allowing customers to set specific rules about when payments can be taken. Such as ‘sweep £100 to savings if I still have £300 in the account on the 15th of the month’, or ‘sweep all excess cash to my loan repayment on the day before payday’.
They now account for over 14% of all Open Banking transactions. Acclaimed for their flexibility and first-time success rates compared to standing orders and direct debits, we expect this percentage to continue to climb.
2. Boost credit scores and mortgage affordability with verified rental payment history
The way that credit scoring works is changing, thanks to Open Banking. With the capability to verify a history of rental payments to landlords, financial institutions like Loqbox are working with Open Banking through Moneyhub, enabling users to improve on their thin credit files to improve mortgage affordability.
How it works:
- Users securely connect their rental-paying bank account to Loqbox Rent, selecting the rent amount and date that payments are made
- Loqbox partners with Moneyhub to accurately categorise and enrich the transaction data, tracking these rental payments
- Loqbox integrates with Experian to report anonymised rent payment behaviour
- This can help individuals boost their credit score and build creditworthiness, enabling access to fairer rates from lenders and saving thousands
This Open Banking use case has helped over 40,000 members through Loqbox Rent, with 89% of users who track their score improving their score.
Importantly – it works as intended. Loqbox has achieved a 4.5-star rating on Trustpilot with over 18,000 reviews, including this one: “since I started saving and my rent payments were reported to the credit agencies, I’ve seen an increase of around 100 points in my score.”
3. Time-saving compliance with new tax return rules
With the introduction of Making Tax Digital (MTD) in 2026, we’ve seen a real buzz around the idea of using Open Banking to remove the manual obligations of compliance.
MTD requires landlords and self-employed workers earning more than £50,000 annually to file four quarterly submissions, a year-end adjustment, and a final declaration. This is significantly more administrative work than the prior single, annual return process. But Moneyhub has been working with The Tax Guys to remove much of the manual burden associated with compliance.
How it works:
- The client connects their financial accounts to the CleanBooks platform securely
- Integration with Moneyhub enables the automatic categorisation and enrichment of transactions, enabling the separation of personal and business expenses and the mapping of transaction data directly to the relevant HMRC tax codes
- Up to 12 months of historical transaction data is retrieved and refreshed monthly, supporting quarterly MTD returns for current and accurate records
Importantly, the Open Banking connections remove the heavy burden of manual processes, such as the spreadsheet-based data entry that currently creates bottlenecks for both advisors and their clients.
“By automating the collection, categorisation, and mapping of financial data, right through to HMRC-ready outputs, we’re enabling The Tax Guys to focus on the advisory work that adds real value, rather than the administrative burden that has historically consumed so much of the profession’s time.”
Dan Scholey, CPO at Moneyhub
4. Faster loan approvals without compromising on risk
The next innovative use case is one born from frustration. At Admiral, it was taking an average of 30 minutes every time an advisor walked through an affordability application with a customer on the phone, moving line by line to place various income, spending, expected bills and loan history amounts into the application form. What’s more, none of the information was verifiable – advisors had to simply rely on the accuracy of self-reported claims from the applicants themselves.
These issues compound with scale. Across Admiral’s 912,000 customers and £5.7 billion of debt, small inefficiencies became a substantial opportunity. Admiral partnered with Moneyhub to increase the number of loans assessed per day.
How it works:
- Applicants connected their accounts to Admiral’s system through Open Banking
- Moneyhub deployed Confidence Connect to identify any incomplete financial pictures and automatically prompt additional specific accounts for more holistic data collection to meet fairness outcomes
- Advanced categorisation and enrichment provided cross-referencing against loan referrals, automating a proportion of low-risk decisions
- Where manual underwriting was required, the underwriters had a much clearer, verified view of a user’s financial picture, enabling the approval of more applications
This use case didn’t only have tangible commercial benefits, but it enabled Admiral to proactively reduce risk, with more precise data reducing delinquency and default rates. The process changed, too. Advisor workload shifted from data entry to exception-based management, providing high-level decisioning without fatigue.
5. Spotting transfer risk scoring before a pension member leaves
This one comes straight from the Moneyhub product team – an Open Banking use case we’re exploring more deeply, and one we know an increasing number of clients are raising as a talking point. It’s one for the pensions firms, who typically only discover a member is leaving when the transfer pack reaches the team. By this point, the decision is made and it’s often too late to intervene.
The opportunity here is that the leading indicators of flight become visible through Open Banking connections, giving firms the opportunity to retain members and their assets before the decision is made.
How it works (in theory):
- The member connects their bank accounts to the pension firm system through Open Banking APIs
- Moneyhub categorises and enriches the data to standardise it and identify risk signals
- Ongoing monitoring of transactions for transfer risk indicators at the two key moments: employer change and life event markers at the ~five years before retirement
- Insights are interrogated by advisors in real-time to trigger personalised interventions (timely, appropriate support) in the moment that matters
- In some cases, it would be appropriate to support a transfer out and pension firms shouldn’t stop them, but in others, the right thing for the member is to be retained
Ready to bring an innovative Open Banking idea to life?
Whether you’re a leading bank, lender, pension provider or a growing fintech, there are still plenty of opportunities to innovate within the Open Banking landscape. This technology makes smart data access possible – and firms like Moneyhub provide the rails to bring your idea to life.
With full authorisation under the FCA as an account information services provider (AISP), payment initiation services provider (PISP) and credit information services provider (CISP), partnering with Moneyhub enables you to build on the regulatory footing we have held since Open Banking was still optional, not mandatory.
Are you ready to join institutions like Nationwide, Lloyds, Standard Life, Admiral Money and Scottish Widows?
About Shannon Trimble
Shannon Trimble is a fintech and regtech content marketing manager based in Manchester, UK. She owns content strategy at Moneyhub and alongside that, interviews our internal subject matter experts, turning their quotes into crystal clear insights. She particularly enjoys transforming traditionally complex or ‘boring’ subjects into engaging content that is genuinely valuable to the reader. Outside of her work, Shannon enjoys escaping the UK winter by chasing the sun.
FAQs
Common examples of Open Banking include automated savings through variable recurring payments (VRPs), credit scores boosted by verified rental payment history, Making Tax Digital returns built from categorised bank data and faster loan affordability checks using verified transactions. Pension providers are also exploring Open Banking data to spot when a member might be at risk of transferring out, so they can offer timely support.
A variable recurring payment (VRP) is an Open Banking payment method that lets a customer authorise payments within rules they set, such as a maximum amount, a frequency or a minimum balance threshold. Unlike standing orders or Direct Debits, VRPs can flex around the customer’s circumstances, making them well suited to automated savings, loan repayments and moving money between a customer’s own accounts. At Moneyhub, VRPs are also known as Smart Payments.
Open Banking lets people share verified evidence of payments that traditional credit files often miss, such as rent. With the customer’s consent, providers like Loqbox use Open Banking to track on-time rent payments and report them to credit reference agencies such as Experian. This helps people with thin credit files build a stronger credit history, which can improve access to fairer rates on mortgages and other lending.
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