ATM Nearby™

Affordability comes down to one number a lender must evidence: what's left after every expense is paid. That's an account information job start to finish - and it's where the two open banking roles split. An AISP reads the transaction picture that makes affordability calculable; a PISP moves the money once the decision is made, but plays no part in working out whether someone can afford anything. Here's why the two belong in separate boxes, and why adoption is now tilting from the reading role toward the acting one.

A banking app that works perfectly at home can fall apart on the first foreign payment. The domestic feed works because the same merchants repeat week after week - the supermarket, the transport operator, the coffee place near the office. The moment a customer lands abroad and taps their card, that repetition disappears, and the app has to answer a harder question from a single transaction record. This is a build guide for tier 1 banks: which fields a transaction record has to carry abroad, and what a borderless banking app can show once it carries them.

Three banks shipped consumer-facing AI assistants inside twelve months, and to anyone being asked whether their own bank needs one, they look like a single trend. They are not. Measured on what the assistant is allowed to do, what it is allowed to see, and the route each bank took to ship it, bunq Finn, Starling Assistant and Revolut AIR turn out to be three different products - and the differences change what can go wrong with each. Here they are set side by side.