PSD3 Clears ECON, Akbank Cuts Over: Open Banking and Core Banking Hit Their Inflection Week

Brussels delivered the regulatory text Europe's banks have been preparing for since 2023, and inside the same seven days, a regulated German bank flipped its retail core onto cloud-native rails. The post-PSD2 era is no longer hypothetical.

There are weeks in financial regulation when very little happens, and there are weeks like this one. As of this week, two long-running storylines, Europe's post-PSD2 open banking rewrite and the slow grind of core-banking modernisation, have produced concrete, on-the-record milestones within days of each other. Following the European Parliament ECON Committee's vote on the final compromise text of PSD3 last Tuesday, and the publication of a successful core migration at Akbank AG Germany this same month, the architectural shift in European banking has stopped being a slide deck and started being a launch plan.

Here is what just happened, what it means for incumbents and challengers, and what to watch between now and the end of Q2.

PSD3 Clears Its Toughest Procedural Hurdle

The headline event came on May 5, 2026, when the ECON Committee of the European Parliament adopted the final compromise text on the proposed Payment Services Directive (PSD3) by 50 votes in favour, 3 against, and 5 abstentions. The Payment Services Regulation (PSR), its sibling instrument, cleared the same vote on the same day. MEP Morten Løkkegaard (Renew, Denmark) served as Rapporteur, according to reporting from the Blockchain Working Group.

This was not a green-field debate. The Council had already published the final compromise texts on April 23–24, 2026, document references ST-8221-2026-INIT for PSR and ST-8222-2026-INIT for PSD3, clearing the path to formal adoption, according to Norton Rose Fulbright's May briefing on PSD3 readiness. Last week's ECON vote was the procedural confirmation. A Parliament plenary vote is expected to follow, with publication in the Official Journal of the European Union anticipated by the end of Q2 2026.

The rules will then apply 21 months after publication, which, on current timelines, points to a live date sometime around Q1–Q2 2028.

What's Actually Different About PSD3

Three substantive shifts matter most for the open banking ecosystem.

First, open banking obligations are no longer just about API availability, they are about provable usability. Norton Rose Fulbright's analysis describes the new regime as "enforceable infrastructure," requiring institutions to demonstrate that access is "fair, usable, and reliable in practice." That's a material upgrade from PSD2's permissive language and, in practice, raises the floor for what counts as a compliant TPP interface.

Second, consent expires faster. Account Information Service Providers (AISPs) will be required to re-authenticate consumers every 180 days to keep consent current, per Freshfields' May 2026 analysis. Aggregators have until now relied on consent rules that decayed at variable cadences across member states; PSD3 harmonises that cadence and resets the relationship.

Third, and this is the headline buried in the text, manufacturers of mobile devices and providers of electronic services will be required to enable front-end providers (apps, wallets, interfaces) to store and transmit data necessary for payment execution on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, according to the Blockchain Working Group's reporting on the final compromise text. That language has obvious implications for Apple Pay, Google Wallet and the closed-loop dynamics of NFC controllers. It also gives European challengers a structural opening they have lobbied for since 2022.

FiDA: Different Story, Same Direction

The companion regulation, the Financial Data Access Regulation (FiDA), has not had the same week. Trilogue negotiations on FiDA, which would extend open-banking-style data sharing to mortgages, savings, investments, insurance, pensions and crypto-assets, have temporarily halted in 2026, with implementation now anticipated for 2027 rather than the originally projected mid-2026 adoption, according to Konsentus' May commentary on FiDA timelines. The Commission's pending-proposals annex from late 2025 has not been refreshed in 2026 in a way that brings FiDA forward.

The destination, Konsentus argues, hasn't changed, only the timetable. But the practical implication is that PSD3/PSR will land first, and FiDA's open-finance scope will arrive into an ecosystem that has already adjusted to the new payments regime.

Core Banking Modernisation: Two Migrations Worth Studying

While Brussels was voting, the core-banking modernisation backlog was producing rare evidence of actual cutovers.

Akbank AG: Mambu Goes Live in Retail

Germany's Akbank AG announced that it has successfully completed the first phase of its core banking migration to Mambu, in partnership with implementation specialist Innovance, according to reporting in Financial IT. All customers and accounts in the bank's Retail and Private segments are now operating on Mambu's cloud-native, composable platform.

The interesting part is not the technology choice, Mambu has been winning challenger and mid-market deals for years. The interesting part is that this is a regulated European bank that ran a phased migration off a legacy system and into production, rather than launching a green-field digital subsidiary alongside it. Most modernisation programmes still default to the parallel-product route. Akbank's example suggests that "rip-and-replace at the segment level" is becoming defensible governance-wise.

Reliance Bank Picks Temenos

In parallel, UK-based Reliance Bank announced plans to migrate its legacy mainframe systems to Temenos Software-as-a-Service. The scope covers core banking, digital banking and payments infrastructure, the full stack, in other words. Temenos remains the default choice for established universal banks running complex, multi-country compliance programmes, and the Reliance announcement reinforces that positioning.

Between Akbank and Reliance, the modernisation question of the past five years, cloud-native challenger platform vs. enterprise SaaS incumbent, looks less like a binary and more like a market-segmentation answer. Mid-market and challenger banks are picking Mambu, Thought Machine and 10x Banking. Large universals are picking Temenos and FIS.

BaaS and Open Finance: The Quiet Consolidation

The third strand is Banking-as-a-Service, which is having a less dramatic but more strategically important year. PSD3 and FiDA together will, according to J.P. Morgan's recent insights piece, "enable companies of all kinds to offer Banking-as-a-Service capabilities and platform banking." That language is significant: the regulatory trajectory now explicitly endorses BaaS as a permitted business model, rather than treating it as a tolerated workaround.

Meanwhile, the data-aggregation layer continues to reshape itself. Tink (a Visa solution) and Coinbase announced a partnership earlier this quarter to enable crypto purchases via Pay by Bank in Germany. ClearBank and Plaid announced a UK partnership to deliver faster, more secure Pay by Bank experiences for businesses and consumers, according to recent Open Banking Tracker reporting. Tink's mindshare in the Open Banking Platforms category sits at 16.8%, down from 31.9% a year earlier; TrueLayer's is 18.7%, down from 34.3% over the same window. Plaid, in February 2026, expanded its open banking capabilities with enhanced identity verification and anti-fraud tools.

The picture is one of consolidation: fewer aggregators with more bank coverage, deeper partnerships with payment networks, and an industry slowly resolving the question of whether Visa owns the European open-banking rails. (On current evidence: increasingly, yes.)

What to Watch Next

Three things between now and the end of June.

One: the Parliament plenary vote on PSD3, which will close out the procedural sequence and start the 21-month clock. Expect publication in the Official Journal by end-Q2.

Two: whether the EU's political debate on excluding Big Tech from FiDA, currently centred on Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, produces a concrete carve-out or a compromise. The answer will shape whether European challengers get a regulatory edge or compete on a level surface against the platforms.

Three: more core migrations. Akbank and Reliance are the visible ones. Several other regulated European banks are mid-flight on similar programmes, and announcements typically cluster around half-year reporting.

The Bottom Line

PSD2's grace period is officially ending. Following last Tuesday's ECON vote, Europe has a finalised text, a known regulatory timeline, and a concrete enforcement architecture for open banking, with PSR, FiDA and the broader open-finance agenda still to play out behind it. In parallel, the core-modernisation pipeline that has been theoretical since 2018 is now producing live cutovers on cloud-native cores at regulated banks.

The decade-long argument about whether European banks would ever actually modernise has, finally, started to answer itself.