At a glance

Stoa has partnered with open banking platform Yapily to enhance financial visibility and decision-making for individuals and businesses. This collaboration supports Stoa's products-Stoa Pots, Stoa Agent, and Stoa Saving Score-by using Yapily's services to connect to customer accounts, interpret transaction data, and facilitate authorised payments. The partnership aims to provide clearer financial insights, more choices, and upfront perks for users, benefiting banks, merchants, and customers alike.

Stoa is working with open banking platform Yapily to give individuals and businesses greater visibility over their money, more choice in how they put idle cash to work, and greater confidence in their financial decisions.

The collaboration supports Stoa’s family of three products: Stoa Pots, Stoa Agent, and Stoa Saving Score.

Together, they help customers understand their money habits, identify cash they may be able to set aside, and discover meaningful perks they can receive upfront when making a deposit through Stoa.

At the core of this experience is Stoa Behavioural Money Intelligence (Stoa BMI), Stoa’s proprietary data intelligence layer sitting beneath all three products. It turns permission-based financial data into insights about customers’ behaviour, spending patterns and potential surplus cash, helping Stoa make its products more useful and relevant to each customer.

Yapily provides key infrastructure supporting this approach through its Account Information Services (AIS), Payment Initiation Services (PIS) and Data Plus transaction categorisation and merchant enrichment.

These capabilities enable Stoa to connect to customers’ accounts with their permission, interpret transaction data and facilitate customer-authorised deposit payments.

Mike Saraswat, CEO and Co-Founder of Stoa, said: “Money confidence starts with visibility. When people can see where their money goes and what they may be able to set aside, they have more choice about what to do next. We want to make that choice useful and rewarding, whether it means understanding a habit, spotting idle cash or getting something that matters paid for upfront.

“Stoa BMI connects that ambition across our product family. Yapily provides important connectivity, enriched data, and payment capabilities, while Stoa turns those building blocks into experiences designed around our customers’ lives and businesses.”

Three products, one connected intelligence layer

Stoa Pots gives customers a choice of upfront perks linked to deposits, helping cover everyday essentials, subscriptions and lifestyle or business costs. Yapily’s Payment Initiation Services enable customers to authorise deposits from their existing bank accounts into accounts held with Stoa’s partner bank. Stoa BMI supports more relevant Pot suggestions by connecting insights about customers’ financial behaviour with benefits they may value.

Stoa Agent, launching soon, will give customers a clearer view across their connected accounts, helping them understand spending, identify potential idle cash and explore relevant Stoa Pots. Yapily’s account connectivity with transaction categorisation and merchant enrichment from Data Plus will support this read-only experience, with Stoa BMI turning the underlying data into useful insights. Data Plus sorts transactions into 190+ categories, with models trained on over 100 million unique merchants. The more relevant accounts customers connect, the fuller the picture Stoa can provide.

Stoa Saving Score helps customers understand their saving behaviour through Stoa’s proprietary scoring approach, built around retention, allocation and regularity. Yapily provides access to permission-based account data and categorised transactions, which Stoa uses to help customers understand their habits and track progress over time.

Sam Goodenough, Co-Founder and CTO of Stoa, said: “We built Stoa BMI as a shared intelligence layer across our three products, so the same understanding of a customer’s financial behaviour can support their Saving Score, inform their Agent insights and make their Pot suggestions more relevant. Yapily’s account connectivity, transaction categorisation and merchant enrichment give us essential building blocks for that approach.

“Having data intelligence at the core allows us to build and scale a connected family of products, with each serving a distinct customer need. Our job is to turn the complexity underneath into something simple and useful for the person using it.”

Building useful products at scale

The collaboration demonstrates how open banking can support a family of useful products built around a shared data intelligence layer. Account connectivity, enriched transaction data and payment initiation bring together the ability to understand money and take a customer-authorised next step.

Stoa’s approach is designed to create value across its wider partner network. For banks, building societies and credit unions, it supports propositions aimed at attracting deposits and building longer-lasting customer relationships. For merchants, it creates opportunities to reach customers with relevant benefits and generate incremental business. For individuals and businesses, the focus remains practical: clearer information, meaningful choice and perks that matter.

Roland Selmer, CPO, Yapily, said: “Stoa shows what becomes possible when financial data and payments are brought together around practical customer needs. From understanding money habits to funding a deposit that unlocks an upfront perk, it puts open banking to work across a connected customer journey.

“What makes this approach particularly interesting is that it makes full use of what Yapily has to offer, which creates value for several participants at once: individuals and businesses using our connectivity to consumer and corporate accounts, and the banks, building societies and credit unions serving them, and the merchants offering relevant benefits. We’re pleased to provide the infrastructure that helps Stoa build and scale that proposition.”

Customer control and availability

Customers control which accounts they connect and authorise any deposit payment separately. Stoa Agent and Stoa Saving Score use read-only account access.

Stoa is not a bank; eligible UK deposits made through Stoa Pots are currently held with Griffin, Stoa’s partner bank.

Stoa Pots and Stoa Saving Score are available now, with Stoa Agent coming soon.

Editorial insight

Open banking collaborations continue to shape the way individuals and businesses interact with their finances, with a growing focus on user control and actionable insights. The partnership between Stoa and Yapily brings together data connectivity and behavioural intelligence, aiming to offer practical benefits beyond basic account aggregation. This approach aligns with ongoing efforts in the UK to encourage innovation in financial services, particularly around transparency, customer empowerment, and value-added features.

For financial institutions and merchants, such collaborations offer potential avenues to deepen customer engagement and generate new business opportunities. As open banking adoption expands, the ability to combine transaction data with tailored incentives and real-time decision tools is becoming increasingly relevant, particularly for providers seeking to differentiate their propositions or respond to changing consumer expectations.

Story ideas and journalist angles

Consumer impact

Impact of Open Banking on Financial Decision-Making

The collaboration between Stoa and Yapily highlights how open banking is transforming consumer financial management by providing greater visibility and choice, allowing individuals to make more informed financial decisions.

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Stoa's use of a proprietary data intelligence layer in collaboration with Yapily demonstrates the increasing role of data analytics in developing personalised financial products.

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