UK open banking payments have more than doubled in the past two years, according to data shared by Matt Jones of Payments Culture and highlighted in a recent Payments:Unpacked roundup. Card payments, over the same period, have barely moved in percentage terms. It's a genuinely strong growth curve. It also comes with a number worth sitting with before anyone gets carried away: for every open banking payment made in the UK, there are still 82 card payments.
Both of those facts are true at once, and both matter. The growth curve says something real is happening. The ratio says it hasn't happened yet, at scale. The useful question isn't which number to believe. It's what the growth is actually made of, because that's what tells you whether the ratio is likely to hold or move.
Pay By Bank, the single-payments option and the more familiar face of open banking, is driving a large share of that doubling. But Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs), now account for almost a fifth of all open banking transactions, and that's the more structurally interesting number of the two. A single payment is a one-off authorization. A VRP is a standing instruction: the customer sets the terms once, within limits they define, and the payment executes against that authority repeatedly without asking again each time.
That's a meaningfully different kind of trust than a one-off card swipe. It's authority granted in advance, scoped to specific limits, and exercised on an ongoing basis, which is precisely the shape of permission an AI agent will need to act on a consumer's behalf in agentic commerce. VRP adoption today is effectively the UK building the plumbing for that model before agentic payments arrive at scale, whether or not that was the explicit goal.
Card infrastructure has had decades and enormous transaction volume behind it. Open banking payments are still early, and a ratio like this is exactly what an early-but-real growth curve looks like before it compounds. The mistake would be reading the ratio as proof the market isn't moving. The other mistake would be reading the doubling as proof the market has already arrived. Both readings skip the more useful question: what does the next unit of growth look like, and what does it need to hold up structurally when it shows up.
A standing payment authority is only as good as the infrastructure verifying that it's being used within the limits the customer actually set. That's true whether the party exercising that authority is a merchant's billing system or, increasingly, an AI agent acting within a customer's chosen constraints. As VRP volume grows from a fifth of open banking transactions toward a larger share, the participants relying on it, banks, third-party providers, and the payment initiation services sitting between them, need the same infrastructure open finance needs everywhere: accreditation for who's authorized to hold and exercise that standing permission, and continuous risk monitoring to confirm it's still being used the way it was scoped, not just at setup but on an ongoing basis.
That's not a hypothetical concern attached to a promising chart. It's the same argument this data makes for itself: growth in standing, scoped authority is exactly the kind of growth that needs verification infrastructure built in before it compounds, not retrofitted after volume makes it expensive to fix.
See how the Invela Network applies standardized accreditation and continuous risk monitoring to standing payment authority as open banking and A2A volume scales.
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.
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