How long should open finance third-party provider risk assessment take? A benchmark guide

"Onboarding" in open finance covers two separate processes that are easy to conflate but don't affect each other: the risk and compliance assessment of a third-party provider, and the technical implementation work – API integration, connectivity testing, go-live – needed to actually connect it. Accreditation and continuous monitoring affect only the first. Technical implementation runs on its own timeline regardless of a provider's accreditation status.

What actually determines risk assessment time

1. Whether accreditation already exists: A provider accredited once against a recognized standard can present that accreditation to a new counterparty rather than restarting the risk assessment from scratch, cutting that specific part of onboarding substantially.
2. The depth of the underlying checks: Financial, operational, security, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance assessment each take time to complete properly; a benchmark that skips any of the four isn't comparable to one that covers all of them.
3. How the provider's own chain is structured: A provider running its own processors and sub-processors takes longer to fully assess than one operating as a single entity, since the same standard needs to extend down that chain too.

Because these factors vary by provider and by network, a shared accreditation standard is a more reliable way to shorten the risk assessment stage than any single fixed benchmark number – but it's worth being clear that this only addresses assessment time, not the separate technical work of actually connecting the provider.

About Invela

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.