Truelayer, the London-based open banking vendor, reported continued strong growth and firm cost control in 2025 but remains a long way from profitability. The business hasn’t yet convinced that A2A payments alone can support a viable business model.
Founded by Franceso Simoneschi in 2016, Truelayer is backed by a stellar roster of investors including Stripe, Tiger Global and Anthemis. It has received funding of $321m in total according to Crunchbase with its latest $130m round in 2021 valuing the business at $1bn.
Truelayer says it is “Europe’s fastest growing Pay by Bank network” and trades with regulatory licences in London and Dublin. Management claims market leading positions in UK, Germany, Ireland and France. Truelayer recently bought Zimpler, a struggling Nordic open banking vendor, which expands its reach in that region and brings direct access to Swish, Sweden’s consumer A2A scheme.
Total payment volume processed grew 52% to £65bn ($85bn) and management says it’s now running at an annualised rate of $150bn. This is impressive stuff.
Truelayer says enterprise merchants such as eBay and Amazon have begun offering open banking payments as an alternative to card payments for eCommerce transactions. Management expects “broader adoption to accelerate as enterprise merchants come to view it as a proven and scalable payment method” although, in the UK at least, there seems no acceleration yet in open banking payment growth.
Revenue grew 39% to £28m in 2025. This is strong growth although the context is important. Against £65bn of payment volume, that represents an implied revenue yield of roughly 4bps, compared with perhaps 15–40bps for a typical merchant acquirer depending on its mix of SME and enterprise merchants. After direct costs, TrueLayer generated gross profit of just over 3bps of volume.
Truelayer’s core problem is that open banking payments are low margin.
That is TrueLayer’s conundrum. Pay by Bank is attractive to merchants partly because it is much cheaper than cards. But you can’t undercut the card networks and acquirers on price and still expect to earn card-like margins.
The hope is that A2A payments is a low-margin anchor product on which more profitable businesses can be built.
Upselling customers high-margin value added services makes sense but, given Truelayer’s enterprise base, won’t be straightforward. These are sophisticated buyers that are comfortable multi-sourcing and good at negotiation.
Returning to the 2025 accounts, administrative expenses fell 2% to £56m, suggesting some strong cost controls, and helping narrow the operating loss to £36m from £43m in 2024. Staff numbers have fallen from a peak of 434 in 2022 to an average of 235 in 2025.
Truelayer leads the open banking sector and is doing many things right. Volume and revenue are strongly up. Costs are flat. Cash burn is reducing and the brand is attracting marquee customers. With these results, the business demonstrates a credible route to profitability for the first time. However, this is critically dependent on proving it can sell additional, high-margin services to enterprise customers.. There’s simply not enough money in processing A2A payments alone to keep the show on the road.