National Australia Bank has acquired full ownership of Banked, the London-based open-banking and account-to-account payments specialist NAB had backed through NAB Ventures since 2022 with follow-on investments in 2023 and 2024. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Approximately 150 Banked employees will join NAB.
The structural significance of the transaction is larger than the deal-size disclosure suggests. NAB has been using Banked’s Pay-by-Bank rails since 2024 to enable real-time A2A payments for its Australian business customers. The acquisition consolidates a proven, in-production technology partnership rather than absorbing an unknown asset. From NAB’s perspective, the bank now controls the rails rather than paying an interchange-equivalent fee to a third party. From Banked’s perspective, the company gains the distribution and balance-sheet support of a major banking parent.
The broader signal is what makes the deal interesting for fintech-watchers. Account-to-account payments are the fastest-growing alternative to card rails in commerce-grade B2B and merchant payments globally, with annual volume growth measured in tens of percentage points across most major markets. The dominant pattern over the last several years has been incumbent banks partnering with open-banking platforms rather than acquiring them. NAB’s move to full ownership represents a meaningful inflection: when banks acquire the rails rather than license them, the economics of A2A payments shift structurally in favor of the banks.
For competitors operating in the same A2A and Pay-by-Bank space — TrueLayer, Token.io, Yapily in the UK and European markets, plus Mastercard’s open-banking arm globally — the NAB-Banked transaction sets a precedent. Each of those competitors now has at least one large bank partner that could, in theory, choose to acquire rather than continue partnering. The path-dependency of the partner-versus-acquire decision matters more than the technology choice.
For Australian merchants and corporate customers using NAB’s payment stack, the customer-facing implication is minimal in the short term. The integration was already in production. The longer-term implication is that NAB now has the engineering velocity and product investment capacity to extend Banked’s capabilities — into stablecoin-adjacent payments under the Australian regulatory framework, into merchant-side acceptance products, and into broader treasury-management offerings.
What to watch next: whether Westpac and Commonwealth Bank of Australia respond with their own open-banking acquisitions; whether NAB extends Banked’s technology into AUSTRAC-regulated stablecoin payment pilots; and whether global money-center banks observing the deal accelerate their own A2A consolidation plays.
Reporting based on FinTech Futures, American Banker, and PYMNTS coverage of the NAB-Banked transaction.
