When AtivaMoney asks for permission to access your bank account, many people hesitate. That is understandable — we are used to guarding our banking credentials like the crown jewels. But Open Banking works in a completely different way from what you might imagine, and understanding how it works is the first step to making confident use of it.
What is Open Banking?
Open Banking is a set of standards and technologies that allows authorised applications to access — with your explicit permission — data from your bank accounts, in a secure and regulated way. In the European Union, this model is regulated by the PSD2 Directive (Payment Services Directive 2), which came into force in 2019 and required every European bank to build secure technical interfaces (APIs) for this purpose.
Put simply: your banking data is yours. PSD2 guarantees that you have the right to share it with whoever you choose — and to revoke that access whenever you want. Banks are no longer the sole gatekeepers of your financial data.
This model opened the door to a new generation of financial tools that can work with real, up-to-date and complete data — instead of relying on manual exports of PDFs or CSVs.
How does it work in practice?
When you connect your bank to AtivaMoney, the process happens in three simple steps:
- You select your bank from the list of available institutions. AtivaMoney uses GoCardless (formerly TrueLayer), one of the largest and most reliable Open Banking providers in Europe, regulated by the FCA in the United Kingdom and by the European Commission.
- You are redirected to your bank's secure environment — not to an AtivaMoney page, but to the bank's official interface. You log in with your credentials directly there, and the bank asks you to confirm what you are authorising (for example: reading transactions from the last 90 days).
- The bank issues an access token that is shared with GoCardless, which in turn provides the transactions to AtivaMoney. At no point does AtivaMoney see or store your banking credentials.
This flow is called OAuth 2.0 and it is exactly the same mechanism you use when you "Sign in with Google" on any application — a well-established and audited technical standard.
Why it is safer than it looks
The most common worry is: "I am giving an app access to my bank account." But the facts are reassuring:
- Your credentials never leave the bank. AtivaMoney never sees your banking username or password. Ever. What we receive is only a read token with a limited scope.
- Access is read-only. The token issued by the bank allows transactions to be viewed, but not payments to be initiated, data to be changed, or any other operation to be performed. It is like giving someone the right to look at your statement without giving them the keys to your house.
- You can revoke access at any time. You just go into your bank account settings and remove the authorisation. Access is cut off immediately, with no need to change passwords or take any other action.
- It is regulated by the European Union. Every Open Banking provider has to be licensed and audited by the competent financial authorities. This is not the Wild West — it is one of the most tightly regulated corners of the technology sector.
What changes for your finances
The practical difference is huge. With Open Banking, AtivaMoney receives your transactions automatically, in real time. There are no manual imports, no CSV files, no risk of introducing errors by copying data. Every transaction is typically available in less than 24 hours after it happens, often within minutes.
You can connect several banks at once — a current account at one bank, a savings account at another, a credit card at a third — and get a consolidated view of your entire financial situation in a single dashboard. Something that only a few years ago was only available to people with a private wealth manager is now within anyone's reach.
Open Banking is not just a technical feature. It is the infrastructure that makes it possible to have truly smart, automated and complete financial management. And that is one of the best things to happen to personal finance in the last decade.