For years, Chief Financial Officers across Central and Eastern Europe have navigated a complex and fragmented financial landscape, where managing multiple entities, bank accounts, and currencies often felt like a high-wire act performed without a safety net. The year 2025, however, marked a profound transformation as open banking evolved from an experimental technology into a piece of critical operational infrastructure, fundamentally altering how businesses in the region manage their financial workflows. This transition was not merely a technological upgrade but a strategic response to a pressing market need for enhanced control, efficiency, and scalability. The operational risks associated with disparate banking access—including delayed data, labor-intensive manual processes, and a lack of real-time cash visibility—had long been accepted as the cost of doing business. Now, a new standard has emerged, driven by the systemic integration of automated finance solutions that promise to unify this fragmented ecosystem and empower finance teams with unprecedented clarity and control over their operations.
The Shift from Experimentation to Essential Infrastructure
The maturation of finance automation from pilot projects to indispensable, business-critical systems has been a defining trend for corporate finance in the CEE region. Historically, finance teams have grappled with significant operational risks stemming from a disjointed banking environment. The daily challenges were immense, involving delayed data availability that hindered timely decision-making, laborious manual reconciliation processes that were both time-consuming and prone to error, and inconsistent payment workflows that varied from bank to bank and country to country. This lack of a unified system meant that achieving a clear, real-time overview of cash positions was a near-impossible task. In 2025, open banking infrastructure began to methodically dismantle these long-standing barriers. The market demonstrated a decisive shift toward embedding bank connectivity and direct payment execution into the very core of business operations, establishing a new paradigm for financial governance and operational efficiency that supports scalable growth.
This evolution was characterized by the deep integration of open banking capabilities directly into foundational business systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Treasury Management Systems (TMS). Rather than treating bank data as an external element to be manually retrieved and processed, companies began to view it as an intrinsic part of their operational data stream. This integration established a new gold standard for financial control, enabling automated, real-time data flows that power more dynamic and responsive financial management. For businesses operating across the CEE region, this meant that financial teams could finally move beyond the limitations of country-specific e-banking portals and manual data entry. The adoption of a unified infrastructure allowed for streamlined workflows, consistent payment execution protocols, and a consolidated view of cash across all entities, creating a robust framework for both day-to-day financial operations and long-term strategic planning.
Quantifiable Growth and Market Adoption
Concrete platform metrics provide compelling evidence of this accelerated adoption, illustrating a market that is not just experimenting with but actively relying on open banking for core financial functions. Over a 12-month period, the volume of monthly processed payments surged by an impressive 120%, climbing from 9,000 to more than 20,000. This dramatic increase signals a deep and growing trust among businesses in executing automated payments through a centralized platform. This confidence is further underscored by the substantial growth in the monetary value of these transactions, which doubled from a monthly average of €25 million in 2024 to €52 million in 2025. Such figures reflect a significant commitment from corporate clients who are now comfortable processing high-value transactions through these new channels. The growth was largely propelled by the widespread adoption of two primary use cases that directly address major operational pain points for finance departments across the region.
The expansion was fueled by both large enterprises and a burgeoning small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector, each leveraging open banking for distinct but equally critical purposes. Large corporate and holding companies adopted specialized treasury solutions for comprehensive bank account consolidation and enhanced cash visibility, giving them a unified command center for their complex financial networks. Meanwhile, SMEs increasingly connected to open banking platforms via their existing accounting and ERP systems to automate the tedious tasks of bank statement retrieval and reconciliation. The number of businesses connected to this ecosystem grew more than fourfold to nearly 3,000, but the most significant aspect of this growth is its nature. These connections are no longer for occasional, experimental use but represent recurring, integral components of daily financial workflows, demonstrating that open banking has become an embedded, operational necessity rather than a novelty.
A Unified Regional Financial Landscape
This momentum was significantly bolstered by a strategic regional expansion that aimed to create a seamless, cross-border financial infrastructure. In Hungary, for example, the push for comprehensive connectivity yielded remarkable success, achieving 95% bank coverage across the country. This deep integration enabled the connection of over 1,000 corporate accounts and the processing of more than 45,000 transactions daily, showcasing the platform’s capacity to handle high-volume operations within a single, mature market. This achievement in one nation served as a powerful model for what could be accomplished across the entire CEE region. By establishing such a high degree of connectivity, the system effectively eliminated the friction and inconsistencies that finance teams previously faced when dealing with multiple domestic banking partners, paving the way for a more standardized and efficient operational model.
Building on this success, the network was concurrently expanded to include the top seven banks in key CEE markets such as Bulgaria, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, and Slovakia. This deliberate and methodical integration created a truly unified infrastructure, allowing regional finance teams to operate without the burden of managing country-specific exceptions or navigating a patchwork of disparate banking interfaces. For a company with operations in multiple CEE countries, this meant that treasury and finance departments could manage their entire portfolio of bank accounts through a single, consistent interface embedded within their core systems. This level of harmonization represents a fundamental leap forward, transforming regional financial management from a fragmented, country-by-country challenge into a cohesive and streamlined operation that can support rapid scaling and more agile business strategies.
The New Operational Reality
It became clear that the central challenge for companies had shifted fundamentally from merely accessing banking data to integrating it effectively and seamlessly into their daily operations. The year 2025 was a watershed moment when the theoretical promise of open banking crystallized into a tangible operational reality for thousands of businesses across Central and Eastern Europe. This was not a gradual evolution but a structural transformation, establishing finance automation as the bedrock for a new era of corporate finance. This foundation enabled real-time visibility into cash flow, facilitated faster and more accurate financial closes, and armed decision-makers with the timely, data-driven insights necessary for informed strategic planning. The widespread adoption signaled that the market had decisively moved past the tipping point, embracing a more connected and automated future for managing corporate finances.
