What is open banking?
Open banking is the regulated opening of bank customer accounts to third-party providers via APIs, with customer consent, for two core services: account information (AIS — aggregating balances and transactions across banks) and payment initiation (PIS — starting a payment directly from the user’s bank account, bypassing cards). Türkiye implemented it within Law 6493: AIS and PIS are licensed payment services supervised by the TCMB, technically standardised and routed through the centralised BKM infrastructure.
What a fintech can build with it
The product surface is wide: multi-bank financial dashboards and SME cash-flow tools on AIS; pay-by-bank checkout on PIS with lower cost than card rails; lending underwriting on real account data; and reconciliation automation for platforms. The legal spine in every case: a licence (or riding as agent of a licensed institution), explicit and specific customer consent per service, strong customer authentication, and a data-protection layer — account data is personal data, so KVKK bases, retention limits and processing records ride along.
The Turkish specifics worth knowing
Three features distinguish the local regime from the EU’s PSD2 pattern. Centralisation: API access runs through the national gateway rather than thousands of bilateral bank APIs — integration is more uniform. Perimeter: only account-servicing institutions’ payment accounts are in scope; credit, investment and crypto accounts sit outside for now. And licensing gravity: “screen scraping” and unlicensed aggregation, tolerated in some markets historically, are squarely regulated activity here — build on the licensed rails from day one.
Is open banking mandatory for banks?
Account-servicing banks must expose the standardised interfaces to licensed providers — the customer’s consent, not the bank’s preference, gates access.
AIS or PIS — which licence do we need?
They are separate services; many products need only one. Read your user journey: showing data is AIS, moving money is PIS, and doing both means both.
Related: payment institution.