We're building the plumbing for European open banking
European banking is fragmented by design — 27 EU member states, the UK, and dozens of legacy institution architectures, each with subtly different PSD2 implementations, SCA flows, and error behaviours. The regulation opened the door, but every fintech team still has to fight through the same integration maze before they can ship a single feature.
We started BankLyra in 2022 because we'd lived that frustration from the inside. Oliver and Sarah had spent years at banks and fintech companies watching smart engineering teams spend months on bank integration work that should take days. The mission is simple: one normalised API layer so every fintech team can focus on their product, not the plumbing.
Founded in 2022. Built from frustration.
BankLyra started as a weekend project in a Moorgate co-working space in late 2022. Oliver had just shipped a lending product that required connecting to 14 different banks — a nine-month integration project. Sarah had built a payments system at a neobank where half the engineering backlog was bank API maintenance. Marcus had watched the same pattern in three different partnership roles across fintech.
The first version was a simple Node.js proxy that normalised UK Open Banking responses. By month three, 11 fintech teams were using it in their sandboxes. By month nine, three were in production. We formalised into a company, moved into Moorgate, and started building the coverage and reliability infrastructure properly.
Four years later, BankLyra covers 2,000+ institutions across 28 countries, processes tens of millions of API calls per month, and supports fintech teams from solo-founder MVPs to growing lending platforms with dedicated engineering teams. We're still in Moorgate, still bootstrapped, and still focused on one thing: making open banking integration not suck.
To be clear about what we are not: BankLyra is not a bank, does not hold customer deposits, does not issue accounts or payment cards, and does not provide financial advice. We are an FCA-authorised AISP and PISP — infrastructure that engineering teams build fintech products on top of.
Small team, deep expertise
We're a focused engineering team with backgrounds spanning banking infrastructure, payments regulation, and developer tooling.
Previously built lending infrastructure at a UK fintech and worked in payments strategy at a major UK bank. Obsessed with reducing API integration time-to-live.
Led platform engineering at a European neobank, where she designed the first production PSD2 consent management layer. Architect of BankLyra's normalisation pipeline.
Background in fintech partnerships and open banking business development across the UK and Germany. Manages bank and TPP relationships for the BankLyra network.
London, Moorgate
We're based in the heart of London's City financial district — five minutes from the Bank of England and surrounded by the fintech firms, banks, and regulators that shape European open banking policy.
Being close to the FCA, to the Payment Systems Regulator, and to the banks we connect to isn't incidental. When PSD2 compliance questions arise or a bank's API changes its authentication scheme, proximity to the ecosystem matters.
30 Moorgate
London EC2A 1NT
United Kingdom
[email protected]
+44 20 7946 0312