Open Banking in the UK didn't launch as a finished product. It launched as a regulatory mandate, in 2018, with a small base of early adopters and a long road ahead. Looking at where that market stands now gives the GCC a genuinely useful preview of what a mature Open Banking ecosystem actually looks like, and how long it realistically takes to get there.
Adoption doesn't happen overnight, but it compounds
In March 2021, roughly 1 in 17 UK consumers and small businesses were using open banking. By March 2025, that had grown to 1 in 5, with active users reaching 13.3 million, a 40% increase on the previous year. By July 2025, the user count had climbed further, to over 15 million people and businesses, nearly one in three UK adults. By December 2025, user connections reached 16.5 million, a 36% increase over the previous year.
That trajectory is the real lesson here. Adoption in the UK didn't spike, it compounded steadily over years, with growth accelerating rather than plateauing as the infrastructure matured and use cases multiplied. Regulators moved early, but consumer and business behaviour took years to catch up, and once it did, the growth curve got steeper, not flatter.
Payments, not just data access, became the growth engine
Early Open Banking activity in the UK leaned heavily on data access rather than payments. That balance has shifted. Payment information service calls grew 53% in 2025, more than double the growth rate of data access calls, and total open banking payments reached 351 million transactions across the year, a 57% increase year-on-year. Recurring payment mechanisms grew even faster: sweeping variable recurring payment volumes nearly doubled, up 98% year-on-year.
This is the shift worth paying attention to. Once the infrastructure existed and businesses had confidence in it, payments overtook data access as the primary driver of growth, because payments are where the commercial value is most direct. The GCC is still earlier in this curve, with much of the current activity centred on data access and early payment use cases. The UK's experience suggests payment initiation, not data alone, is where the larger commercial opportunity eventually concentrates.
Infrastructure reliability is what unlocks scale
None of this growth happened on infrastructure that was still finding its feet. By 2025, the UK's Open Banking system maintained weighted availability above 99.5% across the year, with average API response times improving to 324 milliseconds. That level of reliability is what allowed household names, from HMRC to Just Eat, Tesco, and Ryanair, to build real payment journeys on top of it with confidence.
That's a useful benchmark for the GCC. Infrastructure reliability isn't a nice-to-have that comes later, it's the precondition for the kind of merchant and enterprise adoption that actually moves usage numbers. Businesses won't build core payment flows on rails they don't trust to perform consistently.
What this suggests for the GCC's next five years
The UK took roughly seven years to go from regulatory mandate to nearly one in three adults using Open Banking regularly. The GCC's frameworks are younger, but the region isn't starting from zero the way the UK was in 2018. Licensed providers already exist, banks are already live, and the payments use cases the UK spent years discovering through trial and error, recurring payments, instant checkout, embedded credit, are already understood from the outset.
That's the advantage of moving second. The GCC doesn't need a decade to reach the adoption curve the UK is on now, because the destination is already visible. What it does need is the same discipline around infrastructure reliability, and the same patience to let adoption compound rather than expecting it to arrive in a single product launch.
The UK's decade proves Open Banking adoption is a long game that rewards infrastructure built to last. The GCC's next five years will likely move faster, but the underlying principle won't change.
Why the window matters now
There's a real advantage to being early in this next phase, not just for regulators and banks, but for the businesses building on top of the infrastructure. In the UK, the earliest movers, the fintechs and merchants who integrated Open Banking before it was mainstream, were the ones who shaped the use cases everyone else eventually adopted, and they captured the customer relationships and commercial learnings that came with being first. Businesses in the GCC that build on this infrastructure now are in a similar position. The rails are live, the frameworks exist, and the use cases are already proven elsewhere. Waiting for the market to mature removes the one advantage early movers actually get: getting there before it's the obvious thing to do.