Connecting Your European Bank to a Budgeting App (Finally)

You live in Spain. You have a CaixaBank account for rent and groceries, a US checking account for freelance income, and maybe an N26 for travel. You want a single app that shows all your spending in one place. You download a popular budgeting app. You search for your Spanish bank. It's not there.

For years, this was the norm. The budgeting apps that worked well in the US, the ones with automatic bank syncing and slick transaction imports, fell apart the moment you tried to connect a European account. Either your bank wasn't supported, the connection broke after a week, or you were stuck manually uploading CSV files every month.

The EU actually solved this problem back in 2018 with a regulation called PSD2, which requires European banks to provide secure API access to your account data. But regulation and reality are different things. It took years for banks to build decent APIs, for open banking providers to iron out the thousands of bank-specific quirks, and for the ecosystem to mature to the point where connections actually hold up. In 2026, we're finally there, or close to it. This post explains how it all works and what it means for anyone budgeting across borders.

Why US Bank Connections Worked First

In the US, bank data aggregation has existed for over two decades. A handful of large aggregators built connections to thousands of American banks, and budgeting apps plug into those aggregators to offer "connect your bank" as a feature. It's not perfect, connections still break, some credit unions aren't supported, but for most people with a major US bank account, it works.

Europe didn't have this. Each country had its own banking system, its own regulations, and its own data formats. There was no central aggregation layer. A few companies tried to build one using screen scraping, logging into your bank's website with your credentials and reading the HTML, but banks actively blocked it. The connections were fragile, broke constantly, and raised real security concerns about handing your login credentials to a third party.

The result: if you wanted to budget with European bank data, your options were manual CSV import or a spreadsheet. Neither is a great experience when you're tracking spending across two or three currencies.

What PSD2 Actually Did

In January 2018, the EU's second Payment Services Directive, PSD2, took effect across the EU and EEA. The part that matters for budgeting apps is called Account Information Services (AIS). In plain terms: PSD2 requires banks to provide secure APIs that let authorized third parties access your account data, with your explicit consent.¹

Before PSD2, if an app wanted your bank data, it had to scrape your bank's website using your username and password. After PSD2, banks must provide a proper API, a structured, secure way to share data, and the third party never sees your login credentials. You authenticate directly with your bank, and the bank sends your transaction data to the authorized app.

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements followed in September 2019, adding an extra layer of security: banks must verify your identity using at least two independent factors, something you know (a password), something you have (your phone), or something you are (a fingerprint), before granting access.²

The regulation was a fundamental shift. Instead of fragile screen scraping that broke whenever a bank updated its website, there was now a legal requirement for banks to provide structured, secure data access. The catch: the regulation said banks must provide APIs, but didn't say exactly how. That ambiguity created years of uneven implementation, which is why it took until now for the experience to get good.

How Connecting a European Bank Actually Works

If you've connected a US bank to a budgeting app, the European flow will feel familiar, but there are a few important differences.

1. You search for your bank

You open the budgeting app, tap "Connect bank," and search for your institution, CaixaBank, Deutsche Bank, ING, whatever you use. The app works with a licensed open banking provider that has API connections to banks across Europe.

2. You authenticate directly with your bank

This is where PSD2 differs from the old approach. Instead of typing your bank credentials into a third-party app, you're redirected to your bank's own login page. You enter your credentials there, complete two-factor authentication, approve the data-sharing consent, and your bank sends the data to the authorized provider. The budgeting app never sees your password.

3. Your transactions flow in

Once connected, the app receives your account balances and transaction history. New transactions sync automatically going forward. Depending on the bank, you'll get up to 90 days of history on the initial connection, sometimes more.

4. You re-authenticate periodically (in the EU)

Here's the biggest UX difference from US bank connections. In the EU, PSD2 originally required you to re-authenticate with your bank every 90 days to maintain third-party access. In July 2023, this was extended to 180 days, once you authenticate, your bank is prohibited from requiring SCA again for six months.³ When the 180-day window expires, you log back into your bank and re-approve the connection.

The UK has it easier. In November 2021, the FCA replaced the bank re-authentication requirement entirely. UK users only need to confirm with the budgeting app itself that they still want to share their data, a simple "yes, continue" instead of logging back into the bank.⁴

The EU's approach is more friction, but it's a deliberate consumer protection, the logic being that you should periodically confirm you still want a third party accessing your bank data. In practice, it means about two bank logins per year per connected account.

What's Still Hard

PSD2 solved the fundamental problem, banks must share data through proper APIs. But eight years in, the implementation is still uneven. The user experience varies depending on which bank you use and which country you're in.

Every bank's API is different

PSD2 mandates that banks provide APIs, but it doesn't prescribe a single technical standard. Frameworks like the Berlin Group's NextGenPSD2 and the UK's Open Banking Standard have improved interoperability, but significant variation persists across institutions and countries.⁵ Some banks return rich transaction data with merchant names and categories. Others return a bare amount and date. Some respond in milliseconds. Others time out regularly. One bank might provide 12 months of history; another caps it at 90 days.

This fragmentation is the reason most US-focused budgeting apps haven't simply "added European support." It's not one integration, it's thousands of bank-specific edge cases. The licensed open banking providers that sit between banks and apps exist specifically to absorb this complexity.

Credit cards are often excluded

PSD2 applies to "payment accounts", accounts where you can deposit funds, withdraw cash, and make payments to third parties. Most standalone credit card accounts don't meet this definition, because you typically can't deposit funds into them.⁶ The classification varies by country and specific product, but in practice many European banks don't include credit card transaction data in their open banking APIs. If your main spending happens on a European credit card, you may still need to import those transactions manually.

Data access has limits between re-authentications

Between SCA events in the EU, there's a lesser-known restriction: apps can access either your account balance or your last 90 days of transactions per request, but not both at the same time.³ Open banking providers work around this by making separate requests, but it means the data flow isn't quite as seamless as what you'd get with a US bank connection where there are no such constraints.

Coverage varies by country and institution

Major banks in Western Europe, CaixaBank, Deutsche Bank, ING, BNP Paribas, Santander, generally have solid API support. Smaller regional banks, credit cooperatives, and some newer digital banks can be spottier. Coverage is improving steadily, but if you bank with a small local institution, check whether it supports open banking before assuming automatic sync will work.

What This Means for Expat Budgeting

If you're an American in Europe, or anyone living across currency borders, PSD2 is the reason budgeting apps can now show your European transactions alongside your US ones. Before open banking, this wasn't technically feasible without screen scraping or CSV uploads.

But connecting banks is only half the problem. The other half is what happens after the transactions arrive. When your rent is in euros, your salary is in dollars, and your savings are in pounds, you need the app to convert everything to a common currency so you can actually see whether you're over or under budget.

This is what we built Borderless Budget to do. It connects to your banks in the US, Canada, and EU through regulated connections, pulls in your transactions, and converts everything using daily mid-market exchange rates from the European Central Bank. Your budget shows one unified view across all your currencies, not three separate apps and a spreadsheet to tie them together.

When a bank connection requires re-authentication, we let you know and make it as quick as possible. It's still an extra step a couple of times a year, but it takes 30 seconds, not 30 minutes of CSV wrangling.

What's Coming Next

Open banking in Europe is still maturing. In June 2023, the European Commission proposed PSD3 alongside the Financial Data Access (FIDA) framework, which would expand regulated data sharing beyond payment accounts to include investments, pensions, savings, and insurance.⁷ Both proposals are working through the EU legislative process. If adopted, they would make it possible for budgeting apps to give you a complete financial picture, not just your checking account, but your entire financial life across borders.

The UK is already showing what adoption looks like when the experience is good enough, over 12 million people were using open banking services there by December 2024, a 50% jump in a single year.⁸ As the EU improves its re-authentication flows and bank APIs get better, the rest of Europe is following the same trajectory.

For expats, the direction is clear: connecting your European bank to a budgeting app has gone from "impossible" to "workable with some rough edges." The regulatory foundation is solid. The provider ecosystem is maturing. The remaining friction, re-authentication, API inconsistency, credit card gaps, is getting smoothed out year by year.

If you've been manually tracking your European spending in a spreadsheet, there's a good chance you don't have to anymore.

Related reading:

• Best Bank Accounts for Expats in Europe (2026)
• The Hidden Cost of Living Abroad: Currency Conversion Fees
• Multi-Currency Budgeting: How It Works
• Free Multi-Currency Budget Template