Yapily Sits Out Open Banking Deals After Turning a Profit

Yapily posted a £355,000 profit for 2025 after a £16.2 million loss, and founder Stefano Vaccino says it will sit out open banking takeovers.

The London firm grew turnover from £6.7 million to £16.7 million, has not raised money since 2021, and is hiring engineers for a payments and data wave Vaccino puts in 2027 and 2028. Rivals are buying scale. He is not.

A 2.5x Year, Then a £355,000 Profit

Yapily sells other companies a way to read bank data and start payments from a customer’s account. In a results note on 29 September 2026, Vaccino, the founder and chief executive, said 2025 revenue was 2.5 times the 2024 figure and that the firm was profitable in every quarter from the first. That is the year he is now using to explain why he will not join the buying.

The bottom line is thin beside the operating numbers he also put out. Statutory profit was £355,000. Operating profit was £2.2 million. EBITDA was £3.2 million. He credited a lean cost base and more revenue from the accounts it already had, among them Revolut, Intuit, Adyen and Google, rather than a new pile of logos.

YAPILY’S 2024 AND 2025 FIGURES

Companies House filings for Yapily Ltd put staff at 84 at the end of 2024 and 158 in 2022, so the 102 people on the books at the end of 2025 are still well below the peak. The 2025 profit and sales figures come from the company; the 2025 statutory accounts were not yet the public record when Vaccino spoke on 2 October 2026.

He also disclosed 75 new customers in 2025 and a year-to-date lifetime-value-to-acquisition-cost ratio of 7.7 times, against a 3 times mark he called healthy for the trade. Those ratios are the firm’s own. They are the arithmetic behind a claim he has been making since the loss-making years: buyers of this kind of plumbing care whether the supplier will still be there.

TrueLayer Buys Credit as Yapily Stays a Pipe

The open banking market Vaccino wants to sit out is not standing still. TrueLayer, the London Pay by Bank group run by Francesco Simoneschi, completed its purchase of Swedish paytech Zimpler on 3 March 2026 after announcing the deal in October 2025, then bought Dutch credit firm in3 on 29 May 2026. Simoneschi said the in3 deal lets a shopper pay now or over time from a bank account inside the same checkout, and he framed it as doing for credit what the firm had already done for debit.

TrueLayer said that network reached more than 25 million consumers across 22 countries and processed over $150 billion in annualised payment volume. It also said Pay by Bank already accounts for up to 17% of European ecommerce transaction value. That is a checkout stack. Yapily’s product is the opposite design: a headless, white-label API with no consumer screen of its own, used by firms that want the bank connection without inheriting someone else’s checkout.

OPEN BANKING DEALS AROUND YAPILY

• Zimpler: TrueLayer announced the Nordic Pay by Bank purchase in October 2025 and closed it on 3 March 2026 after Swedish approval.
• in3: TrueLayer added Dutch consumer credit on bank rails on 29 May 2026, with terms undisclosed, ahead of UK deferred-payment credit rules on 15 July 2026.
• obconnect: PayPoint took a 55.3% stake on 30 October 2024 for £17.2 million, later bought the remaining 44.7% for £6.4 million, then recorded a £4.1 million impairment on the holding.

PayPoint’s write-down is the unglamorous half of consolidation. Buying an open banking asset does not guarantee the revenue curve that justified the cheque. Vaccino said he still expects more deals in the sector. Asked if Yapily had been in talks, he said: “We prefer to remain on the sidelines for the moment and focus on organic growth and sustainable growth.”

Shops Still Wait for Wave 2 Recurring Payments

The product he is waiting on is a recurring bank pull that can flex inside a cap the customer has already set. Sweeping variable recurring payments move money between accounts the same person owns. Commercial VRPs send money to a business. Open Banking Limited says commercial VRPs now live in the UK through a scheme run by the UK Payments Initiative, covering bills, financial services top-ups and charity payments on one consent.

Wave 1 of that scheme went live on 2 June 2026 at Money20/20, for lower-risk uses: government, utilities, charities and regulated financial services. It is a substitute for Direct Debit and card-on-file in those sectors, not a new button on a fashion checkout. The Payment Systems Regulator has already put VRPs at 16% of UK open banking payments, so the rail is no longer a pilot in the uses that are live.

THE CVRP CALENDAR

1. Through 2025: Sweeping VRPs, moving money between a person’s own accounts, become a material share of open banking payments.
2. 2 June 2026: UKPI takes Wave 1 commercial VRPs live for government, utilities, charities and regulated financial services.
3. 2026: UK Finance, with Deloitte, publishes a commercial model for Wave 2 ecommerce uses, with a centrally set fee paid by the payment firm to the customer’s bank.
4. Late 2026 into 2027: Ecommerce cVRP remains the next phase, not a finished shop rail, while operators still have to set fees and purchase protection.

Vaccino told interviewers that commercial variable recurring payments are moving into ecommerce. The live scheme has not made that jump. UK Finance’s Wave 2 paper is an input to UKPI and others, and the trade body was careful to say it does not set the fee. Until that fee and the consumer-protection model exist, a one-click bank pull that behaves like card-on-file in a shopping basket is still a plan.

Why 2027 and 2028 Matter for Open Banking

Vaccino’s calendar is blunt. “I think 2027 and 2028 are going to be very important years from an open banking perspective.” He is hiring engineers into that wait. In the 29 September note he called 2026 a year of heavy building, with premium payments APIs coming on, PSD3 tightening quality, and Financial Data Access widening what can be shared beyond payment accounts. Future funding, he said, would happen “if we think open banking needs an acceleration”.

Wave 1 Covers Bills and Government

That is why the sidelines line is not a vow of poverty. Wave 1 already gives utilities and regulated collectors a bank-to-bank mandate. If Wave 2 prices in, the same infrastructure firms will be asked to run high-volume shop payments without sending the customer back into a banking app every time. Yapily’s VRP docs already treat mandates as a product, not a slide. The gap is commercial, not a missing API diagram.

A checkout network that wants to stand in for cards has a different problem, which is why TrueLayer bought a credit firm. Debit from the bank account does not, on its own, replace the borrow-to-buy button. Yapily is not assembling that stack. It is selling the pipe to people who might.

The EU Data File Has No Live Date

Financial Data Access is the EU file that would force holders of a much wider set of financial data, savings, credit, insurance, pensions, to share it with authorised firms on customer consent. The Commission tabled it in June 2023. Industry notes through 2026 still treat adoption as a 2026 hope with duties phasing in later, and the Austrian Economic Chamber said in September 2026 that trilogue talks had no new date and might not move in the current Commission term.

So “soon” is Vaccino’s word, not a statute. If FiDA slips, the 2027 and 2028 surge he is staffing for becomes a UK payments story, not a pan-European data story. The bet still works if ecommerce cVRP lands. It gets lonelier if both files drift.

Solvency Is Part of the Product Now

The reason a profitable pipe can refuse a deal is that its customers are building products on it. In February 2025, after Yapily signed Adyen and while 2024 losses were still being closed out, Vaccino said a lot of customers had become “very sensitive about the financial situation of their supplier”. A year later he went further.

Profitability isn’t a nice-to-have for a business like ours. It’s part of what customers are buying, as much as uptime is. It’s what lets us keep investing in the platform they’re building on.

Stefano Vaccino, founder and chief executive of Yapily, in the 2025 results note

That line is the commercial logic of sitting out. A payments network can buy a credit firm and go after Visa. A headless API sells something quieter: the supplier will still be patching bank connections in 2028. In July 2026 Yapily said it was expanding bank-account verification for Google Cloud customers across Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Ireland and Sweden, and put its coverage at more than 2,000 banks in 19 UK and European markets. Named enterprise logos in that update included Google, Adyen, Ant Group, Intuit QuickBooks, Pleo and Allica Bank.

WHO IS BUILDING ON THE PIPE

• Adyen: The payments firm began Adyen using Yapily account data for merchant onboarding and verification from January 2025, with room to move into credit checks later.
• Google: Bank-account verification on Google Cloud in 11 European markets, offered as an alternative to sending documents.
• Revolut and Intuit: Existing accounts Vaccino cited when he explained the 2025 revenue jump as deeper use, not only new logos.
• Credit data: In September 2026, Estonia-based Mifundo began feeding Yapily’s categorised bank data into cross-border credit checks, another case of someone else owning the product on top.

A licensed pipe also attracts firms that do not want their own payment licence. That is a different market from TrueLayer’s merchant checkout, and it is one in which looking like a going concern is the pitch. The 7.7 times LTV/CAC figure is how Vaccino tells those buyers the unit economics now match the uptime story.

Five Years After the Series B

Yapily closed a $51 million Series B in 2021, led by Sapphire Ventures, with Lakestar, HV Capital and Latitude joining. The 21 July 2021 announcement put total capital at $69 million and talked about covering 95% of Europe, hiring in France and Spain, and then looking beyond the continent. Vaccino said at the time that open banking infrastructure would “shift the power to consumers for years to come” and that the company was “only starting to scratch the surface”.

Five years later the surface is a profitable, smaller firm that has not raised since. Headcount went from 79 in 2021 to 158 in 2022, then down to 117, then 84, then back to 102. That is what “lean” looks like in the filings: a cut after the boom hire, then a modest rebuild once the losses shrank. In 2024 the company still lost £16.2 million on £6.7 million of sales. The 2025 swing is the first year the 2021 cheque can be described as having funded a going concern rather than a search for the next round.

FIGURES YAPILY PUT ON THE 2025 YEAR

• EBITDA: £3.2 million, against a statutory profit of £355,000 on the same year.
• Operating profit: £2.2 million, the line Vaccino uses to show the core business covering itself.
• New logos: 75 customers added, on top of deeper billing from names already live.
• LTV/CAC: 7.7 times year to date, which the company set against a 3 times rule of thumb.

He has been consistent about not raising. In February 2025 he said there were no plans for fresh funding and that the aim was “sustainable growth, which doesn’t always mean to have immediate profitability”. Immediate profitability arrived in the first quarter of 2025 and held. The sidelines comment is that policy with a takeover market now attached to it.

The Sidelines Leave Little Room for a Miss

The wager has a cost. Statutory profit of £355,000 on £16.7 million of sales is a rounding error in a funding round and a thin buffer if a large customer leaves. PayPoint’s £4.1 million impairment on obconnect is a reminder that open banking assets can shrink after they are bought; it is also a reminder that independent firms can be left watching a slower market with no new capital. Vaccino’s own test for raising again is whether open banking “needs an acceleration”. If Wave 2 ecommerce stays stuck on fees, and FiDA stays stuck in trilogue, he may have to decide whether that test has been met.

What he will not do, on his 2 October 2026 wording, is spend the first profitable year buying a competitor. TrueLayer is building a debit-and-credit checkout. Yapily is selling a pipe whose customers now treat the supplier’s solvency as part of the spec. The 2021 round has to carry that stance until 2027, unless he changes his mind about acceleration.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of company figures and public statements, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any share or stake, or a forecast of Yapily’s future results, funding or deal activity. Readers who are considering an investment, a supplier contract or a commercial partnership should consult a qualified financial adviser or corporate-finance professional who can review the latest filings and contract terms. Turnover, profit, staff, deal values and regulatory dates reflect the company notes, filings and official pages cited here as of 2 October 2026 and may change when 2025 accounts are filed or when cVRP and FiDA rules move.