TrueLayer's open-banking bet lands: eBay invests and adds Pay by Bank at checkout

TrueLayer runs an open banking network: APIs that let businesses read bank account data and accept account-to-account payments, sold as verification, payouts and its Pay by Bank checkout product.

That regulator-forced open banking would stop being a compliance exercise and become a payment rail shoppers choose at checkout — and TrueLayer would be the network.

Co-founders Francesco Simoneschi and Luca Martinetti founded TrueLayer in 2016 and spent the next decade building open banking APIs in the UK — first letting businesses read account data, then letting them take payments directly from bank accounts.

By fiscal 2024 revenue had grown to £20.3M from £12.4M in 2023, and the pre-tax loss narrowed from £55.6M to £38.6M. Stripe, Tiger Global, Tencent and Temasek were among its investors. In February 2026 eBay introduced Pay by Bank for UK buyers at checkout through TrueLayer and eBay Ventures made a strategic investment of undisclosed size — the first public round since a 2024 $50M raise that reportedly ended TrueLayer's unicorn status.

Still running and scaling: the eBay checkout rollout is TrueLayer's highest-profile merchant win, revenue roughly doubled between 2023 and 2024, and the PSD3-era regulatory calendar is expanding the same open banking rails it operates.

TrueLayer bet on neutral infrastructure rather than a consumer brand: banks and merchants could plug its APIs in without handing over their customer relationships.

eBay gave the demand-side proof at mass-market scale, framing Pay by Bank as a way to diversify its payment mix with a secure, real-time option.

The regulatory calendar widened the same plumbing: PSD3/PSR made open finance mandatory by January 2028, so the network TrueLayer already operates faces deadline-driven expansion of data sources.

Its economics improved as the bet matured: revenue rose from £12.4M to £20.3M while the pre-tax loss fell from £55.6M to £38.6M, evidence the network model was gaining scale before the eBay deal.

A compliance API becomes a business when it sits under a real transaction: TrueLayer's decade of data plumbing paid off once an eBay-sized checkout said yes.

As of September 2026 TrueLayer is an active, scaling business: eBay's UK checkout offers Pay by Bank, and PSD3/PSR — in force in the EU since 1 July 2026 — extends mandatory data sharing to savings, investment, insurance and pension accounts by January 2028, a widening FinanceX expects to reward networks like TrueLayer. In the UK, TrueLayer is part of the UKPI consortium funding a commercial variable recurring payments scheme, with VRPs already 16% of UK open banking payments. The company's most recent public figures remain fiscal 2024: £20.3M revenue and a £38.6M pre-tax loss.