Most coverage of open banking benefits reads like a brochure: more data, more cross-sell, happier customers. All true, and easy to find. What is harder to find, and far more useful if you are the executive who has to sign off on the program, is an honest account of what open data delivers for a bank, what it costs, and where the genuine risks are today. Because the banks that get the most out of open data are the ones identifying and adjusting to risks clearly, not ignoring them.
This article is the benefits-and-risks companion to our previously published guide, Open Banking & Open Data for Banks: How to Win and Grow SMB Accounts. (If you need the basics, start with our explainer, What Is Open Banking?).
Here, we focus on the part that determines whether the investment pays off: the benefits worth chasing, the open-data use cases that move revenue, and the risks that derail programs when nobody plans for them.
Open data, defined
Open data is the extension of open banking beyond the bank account. Where open banking covers the consented, API-based sharing of banking and payment data, open data applies the same principle — the customer permissions it, an API moves it — to the wider financial and operational picture: accounting, invoicing, commerce, payroll, expense, and lending data. For a bank, open data is what turns a partial view of an SMB into a complete one.
The distinction matters commercially, not just semantically. A bank that only sees its own accounts is looking at a slice of the business. A bank operating on open data sees how the business runs — the receivables, the card volume, the seasonal revenue swing, the payroll cadence, etc. That is the difference between guessing what an SMB needs and knowing. The shift is well underway: the global open banking market is projected to grow from roughly $35.3 billion in 2025 to more than $190 billion by 2034, and more than 87% of US consumers already use open banking to link financial accounts with third parties. The rails exist. The question is what a bank does with them.
The benefits worth building a strategy around are not abstract. Each one maps to a line on the bank's P&L, and each one is measurable. Here are the four benefits that consistently justify the investment.
The single biggest benefit is also the least discussed: open data closes a blind spot the bank cannot otherwise fix. The average commercial bank engages only 10-20% of an SMB customer's wallet, and just 3% of banks capture more than 80% of a customer's wallet. The rest sits with other providers — invisible to the relationship manager and impossible to defend or grow. Open data makes the rest of the wallet visible.
Deposit competition has become the defining pressure of the moment. Net interest margins are compressed, funding is expensive, and the SMB book is the highest-return segment most banks can mobilize quickly. Open data lets a bank pull competitor account balances into its own digital channel through consented connections — the same act that shows the SMB the bank is the most useful place to log in also surfaces where deposits are sitting elsewhere. Consolidating wallet share in an existing relationship is materially cheaper than acquiring a new depositor.
SMBs do not leave their bank for a loan because the rate is better elsewhere; they leave because the decision is faster. Banks lose SMB lending volume to online lenders largely on speed and friction. Consented revenue, expense, and deposit data feed directly into underwriting, enabling pre-qualified offers and same-day decisions on risk-adjusted data that is often richer than what a fintech can see. The benefit is captured loan volume that the bank was previously leaking.
Segment-based campaigns assume what an SMB might need. Open data shows what it truly needs and when it needs it. Merchant services surface for the business whose card volume just tripled; a treasury product reaches the one sitting on idle balances; a line of credit lands before the cash-shortfall trend forces the SMB to look elsewhere. Cross-sell conversion climbs when the offer matches a real signal rather than a demographic bucket — and the bank lifts fee income and customer trust in the same motion.
It helps to see the benefit and the use-case side by side. The left column is what the bank builds; the right is the outcome it is measured on.
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Open data use case |
The benefit it pays out |
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Cashflow insights |
A reason for the SMB to log in daily — the leading indicator of retention and deposit consolidation. |
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Lending signals |
Faster, pre-qualified decisions that recapture loan volume from online lenders. |
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Multi-bank visibility |
Primary-bank status and deposit consolidation for the SMBs that bank across several providers. |
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Proactive engagement |
Retention lift — the RM intervenes on a data signal before the SMB starts shopping. |
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Data-driven cross-sell |
Higher conversion and fee income from offers timed to real behavior, not segment assumptions. |
This is the section most “benefits of open banking” articles skip, and it is the one that decides whether a program survives its second year. The risks below are not reasons to avoid open data. Instead, they are reasons to execute it with precision.
For years, pulling SMB data through aggregators was effectively free, and many financial plans quietly assumed it would stay that way. That assumption is breaking down, with the economics increasingly negotiated commercially. In late 2025, JPMorgan Chase reached agreements with the major data aggregators — Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar, and Akoya — to charge for access to customer account data, and industry observers expect more banks to follow. For a bank building its growth plan on open data, the takeaway cuts both ways: connectivity may carry a cost you have to model, and the terms of access are increasingly set by private commercial agreements rather than a uniform standard. A platform partner with broad, established source connections insulates you from negotiating each of those connections yourself.
Pulling in accounting, payroll, and commerce data alongside banking data multiplies the value of the insight — and the consequences of getting security wrong. Connecting more data types means more endpoints, more credentials in motion, and more new fraud methods like account takeovers and data-scraping attacks. The mitigation is not to do less; it is to insist on bank-grade foundations before any data moves: ISO 27001 certification, SOC 2 Type 2, annual penetration testing, and encryption in transit and at rest.
The most common failure mode is quieter than a breach or a lawsuit: the platform launches, and SMBs do not use it. Open data only delivers a benefit when the SMB connects their accounts, and they will not do that for a screen that says, “connect your data.” They will for “see your cash position across every account in one place.” Adoption is a positioning and UX problem disguised as a technology project. Lead with the benefit, surface the feature where the SMB already banks, and make the first insight visible before the second screen.
The honest summary
The benefits of open banking for banks are real and measurable: visibility, deposits, lending volume, and smarter cross-sell. The risks are equally real but manageable — shifting data-access economics, a wider security surface, and adoption. The banks that win are not the ones that ignore the risk column. They are the ones that plan for it and build anyway, because the cost of waiting is share-of-wallet walking out the door one quarter at a time.
9Spokes is a white-labeled data and insights platform built for financial institutions that serve SMBs. It is designed to capture the benefits above while neutralizing the risks. SMB customers connect business and personal accounts across 800+ financial and business service providers for a unified view of their finances under the bank's brand — so the breadth-of-connections risk is the partner's problem, not yours. Relationship, credit, and marketing teams get the same consented data shaped into cross-sell signals and early risk indicators. And the platform is ISO 27001 certified, annually penetration-tested, and compliant with GDPR, PSD2, and CCPA — the bank-grade foundation that the security and liability risks demand.
The result is the benefit without the build: daily SMB engagement on the front end, better decisions on the back end, embedded in the bank's existing digital channels and measured in deposits, revenue, retention, and risk.
Ready to move from benefits to execution?
Knowing the benefits and risks is step one. The Banker’s Playbook for Open Banking covers the sequencing: which use-case to build first, in what order, with which team, and how to measure it.
Get the free ebook: How to Unlock SMB Growth with Open Data →
The four benefits that map directly to a bank's P&L are: visibility into the full SMB wallet (which the bank otherwise cannot see), deposit consolidation from competitor accounts, recaptured lending volume through faster pre-qualified decisions, and higher cross-sell conversion from offers timed to real data signals rather than segment assumptions.
Open banking covers consented, API-based sharing of bank account and payment data. Open data extends the same consent-and-API principle to a much broader set of financial and operational data — accounting, invoicing, commerce, payroll, and expense — giving the bank a complete picture of how an SMB operates rather than just what flows through its own accounts.
Three stand out: shifting data-access economics, with large institutions beginning to charge aggregators for data, so connectivity may carry a cost; a wider security and liability surface as more data types are connected; and the risk that the program stalls on low SMB adoption rather than on technology. Each is manageable with the right partner and a deliberate rollout.
Reach out to sales@9spokes.com with any questions.