A new Finextra Research survey of 195 European payments professionals found that competitive tensions between providers (23%), security and risk concerns (17%), and cross-border coordination (16%) are the top three barriers to a truly interoperable European payments market, while legacy infrastructure ranks lowest, at just 7%. The finding cuts against a common assumption: that modernisation is a technology problem. It isn't. It's a governance problem.
Every regulator in Europe governs within its own jurisdiction: the FCA in the UK, BaFin in Germany, the ACPR in France. Each one owns a single picket in the fence. Passporting lets a provider authorised in one EU member state operate across the bloc, but the UK sits outside that regime post-Brexit, so UK and EU third-party providers each need separate authorisation to serve the other market. However, even where passporting removes that friction, oversight of what a provider actually does stays with the regulator that authorised it. Which means that data and payments still move horizontally, through the gaps between pickets, faster than any single regulator's view of the whole picture.
The Finextra data backs this up. Firms ranked cross-border coordination and regulatory fragmentation as leading barriers to interoperability, well ahead of legacy infrastructure. Even with passporting in place, supervision is largely periodic and point-in-time, while the risk it's meant to catch is continuous and cross-border. That mismatch, not the age of anyone's tech stack, is what's actually holding the market back.
Only 22% of respondents said Open Banking and Open Finance have fully delivered on their original promise. A third cited infrastructure that proved harder to implement than expected, and 36% pointed to the difficulty of building a universal, ecosystem-wide experience. Combined, that's well over two-thirds of the market saying the model is still incomplete.
Whatever the primary reasons behind Europe's uneven rollout – and there are many - a related risk is worth watching as open finance scales into new markets such as the US and Canada: a network of participants without a common accreditation standard and continuous risk visibility carries its own exposure, separate from how well any single API performs.
Nearly half of respondents (49%) said their organisation reactively adapts systems as regulatory deadlines approach, versus 40% who modernise proactively. Financial crime and payment integrity rules, operational resilience regulation such as DORA, and AI-specific regulation now top the priority list. Belgium and France lean furthest toward reactive adaptation; the UK and Germany show a more even split.
The pattern is familiar to anyone tracking Consumer-Driven Banking rules in Canada or Section 1033 in the US: institutions are focusing on deadlines, and treating each new rule as a discrete compliance exercise. That's a reasonable response while the rules themselves are still unsettled: building ahead of regulatory certainty carries its own cost and risk for a regulated entity. But it does mean the infrastructure gets rebuilt with every new rule, rather than built once to absorb the next one.
Agentic AI adoption is now close to universal, with risk management (57%), fraud detection (53%), and cybersecurity (52%) as the leading use cases. But the top concern isn't whether the technology works: it's regulatory and compliance risk (23%) and a shortage of internal skills (21%), followed closely by integration with legacy systems and data privacy.
In other words: institutions are deploying AI into their most sensitive functions faster than they can govern it. That's a liability question as much as a technology one. Monitoring how AI is deployed across a network of participants, not just whether it's deployed, is becoming as important as monitoring the transactions themselves.
None of this is a story about Europe lacking modern infrastructure. It's a story about fragmentation, competitive, regulatory, and geographic, outpacing the industry's ability to coordinate around it. Firms are investing in risk controls and infrastructure upgrades first, according to the same survey, which suggests the market already knows where the gap is. What's missing is the connective layer that makes accreditation, risk visibility, and liability allocation consistent across a network, rather than negotiated separately with every participant.
See how the Invela Network closes this gap.
Invela is the infrastructure layer that makes open finance trustworthy - accrediting who's in the network, monitoring risk in real time, and ensuring liability lands in the right place. Open finance, covered.
Source: Finextra Research, "The New European Payments Landscape: Navigating Change in 2026 and Beyond," June 2026 (survey of 195 respondents across Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Belgium, conducted April 2026).
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