How Peaks scaled seamless investing across Europe with Open Finance

For fintechs and digital banking teams, growth is supposed to be the exciting part. A new market. A bigger customer base. A chance to prove the product has global relevance and demand. 

But expansion can quickly reveal the hidden complexity behind a seamless customer experience.

Every market can bring new bank integrations, different API standards, additional compliance requirements and new points of friction in the onboarding journey. What looked simple in one country can become harder to repeat in the next.

That is the challenge Peaks, a Netherlands-based investment app, faced as it expanded beyond its home market. Its proposition is intentionally simple: to make investing truly simple and accessible to everyone. To keep that experience simple while scaling across Europe, Peaks needed the infrastructure behind the scenes to be just as reliable, secure and repeatable.

The result is a useful lesson for any organization looking to turn open finance from a concept into a practical growth engine.

Open finance helps Peaks verify a customer's bank account by using permissioned data, without asking customers to upload documents or share their login credentials. This gives Peaks customers the easy, straightforward experience the brand is known for: linking a bank account and getting started in around five minutes. As of June 2026, the platform supports more than 100,000 customers across markets, and 85% of users actively engage with the app for investing.

Those numbers matter because they point to something bigger than a faster sign-up flow. They show what can happen when a financial experience is designed around consent, security and connected data from the start.

For Peaks, the goal was not simply to expand into new markets. It was to do so without rebuilding the product, reworking operations or adding friction for customers every time it crossed a border.

Peaks’ expansion into Germany highlights a challenge many fintech teams know well.

In the Netherlands, initial growth relied on direct connections to a smaller number of banks. Germany was different. Expansion meant integrating with thousands of institutions, each with different APIs and standards.

“When we expanded to Germany, we faced the challenge of integrating with hundreds of banks and varying API standards,” says Jeroen Mulder, COO of Peaks. “That’s when we partnered with Mastercard Open Finance, which aggregates access through a single API, simplifying maintenance and scaling across Europe.”

That kind of fragmentation can slow growth in several ways. Engineering teams spend more time maintaining integrations than improving the product. Customer journeys become inconsistent from one bank or market to another. And as credentials and sensitive data move through more systems, the exposure to fraud, security and operational risk can increase.

For many organizations, this is the point where expansion becomes less about growth and more about complexity management.

Peaks did not try to solve fragmentation market by market. It changed the infrastructure model.

By using Mastercard Open Finance, Peaks gained access to various banks and other financial institutions through a single API, reducing the need to build and maintain individual connections. That gave the company a more consistent foundation for expansion, with less engineering overhead and a clearer path into new markets.

The shift may sound technical, but the business impact is straightforward: instead of rebuilding integrations every time it expands, Peaks can scale on infrastructure designed to be repeatable.

For fintechs and financial institutions, that distinction matters. Growth becomes easier to plan when the underlying connectivity is not reinvented with every new market.

Reducing risk without slowing the customer down starts with knowing that the person connecting an account is the person who owns it. Open finance helps make that possible by using permissioned bank data and bank-led authentication to verify account ownership quickly and securely, without asking customers to upload documents or share credentials directly with the business.

With open finance, instant bank account verification means businesses can rely on advanced account verification tools to verify the account owner is accurate. In fact, Peaks never has to handle customer bank credentials directly. They only receive account data once ownership has been verified.

“Open finance means we never handle customer bank credentials — authentication happens at the bank level, so we only receive the data we need, minimizing risk,” says Mulder. “The onboarding process is seamless: customers link their bank account, give consent, and can start investing in about five minutes.”

This approach helps reduce exposure to sensitive login details and can strengthen trust in the customer journey. It also reflects a broader principle behind open finance: better experiences should not require businesses or consumers to take on unnecessary data risk.

For Peaks, security is built into the customer journey, not an afterthought.

In open finance, consumer consent should not feel like a compliance step bolted onto the journey. It should be an inherent part of product design: clear, purposeful and embedded into the moment when customers choose to connect their financial data.

Traditional onboarding can ask people to upload documents, complete forms and repeat verification steps. Each additional action creates another opportunity for drop-off.

Peaks took a different approach. Customers can securely connect their bank account and consent to share relevant account data, creating a faster route into Peaks' service. Account owner verification can happen in near real-time through permissioned data, reducing the need for manual checks and making the process feel like part of the product rather than a barrier to it.

That matters because consent works best when the value exchange is clear. Customers are more likely to share data when they understand why it is needed, how it will be used and what they get in return. In this case, the benefit is clear: an easier and faster route to access Peaks’ investment services.

Compliance is often one of the biggest constraints on growth for financial services companies.

Open finance can give Peaks efficient access to customer-permissioned financial information from connected accounts, helping to streamline verification processes and reduce reliance on customer-supplied documentation. Peaks remains responsible for conducting its own risk-based assessments and meeting applicable compliance requirements.

This can support more efficient due diligence, onboarding and verification processes, reduce operational overhead and make compliance activities easier to scale with the business. Just as importantly, it can do so while supporting a better customer experience.

For growing fintechs, that balance is increasingly important. Compliance remains at the forefront, yet the customer journey needs to be fast and connected.

With the right infrastructure in place, Peaks has been able to expand beyond its initial markets, with plans to grow further across Europe. The core advantage is not only that expansion becomes faster. It is that the model becomes more repeatable.

A single infrastructure layer can help create more consistent customer experiences across geographies, reduce the cost of growth and make market entry easier to manage.

For organizations weighing how to scale open finance, the lesson is clear: the foundations matter. A great front-end experience depends on what happens behind the scenes — the data connectivity, consent flows, authentication and security standards that make the experience work.

Peaks’ story is not just about one fintech entering new markets. It is a reminder that open finance is becoming a practical infrastructure choice for organizations that want to grow without adding unnecessary complexity.

The organizations gaining momentum are not simply adding more integrations or layering new tools onto old systems. They are rethinking the infrastructure that growth depends on by:

• simplifying integrations instead of multiplying them
• embedding trust into the experience rather than adding it later
• replacing manual processes with real-time, permissioned data
• building for scale from the start instead of retrofitting later

In open finance, the advantage is not only access to data. It is the ability to use permissioned data responsibly, securely and in ways that create clear value for the customer.