Is it safe to connect my bank to an app? How Open Banking works

1. You never type your credentials into FinBoard

The connection flow sends you to your bank's own website or app. You log in there, with your usual credentials and your usual second factor. FinBoard never sees, receives or stores them — there is no field for them anywhere in the product.

This is the difference between Open Banking and the old screen-scraping approach, where an app asked for your bank password and logged in pretending to be you. If any app still asks you for your banking password, that alone is a reason to walk away.

2. Read-only is a technical limit, not a promise

What you authorise is access to information: balances and transactions. Payment initiation is a separate permission that FinBoard does not request and cannot use. So the question "what if they make a transfer?" has a structural answer: the permission for that was never granted.

It is worth insisting on the wording, because it matters: not "we would not do it", but "we cannot". Those are very different guarantees, and only one of them survives a change of management.

3. A regulated provider in the middle

FinBoard does not talk to each bank directly. The connection goes through GoCardless, an authorised provider under PSD2, which is the European regulation that created this whole mechanism and the supervision that comes with it.

Practical consequence: the access is not an informal arrangement between an app and a bank. It is a regulated channel with defined rules about consent, duration and what may be requested.

4. You keep the switch

The permission expires by design and has to be renewed by you. And you can revoke it at any time, from your own bank, without asking us for anything — that is not a courtesy we grant, it is part of how the regulation is built.

• You authorise at your bank, with your own second factor.
• The access is read-only: no transfers, no payments, no changes.
• The consent expires and must be renewed by you.
• You can revoke access from your bank whenever you want.