PayPoint Completes AperiData Acquisition to Deepen Open Banking
PayPoint has completed the acquisition of AperiData, a real-time credit reference agency and Open Banking platform, following an initial £1million minority investment in 2024. The deal, announced on 24 June 2026, brings AperiData fully into the PayPoint Group and marks a meaningful expansion of the listed company’s Digital Payments and Open Banking business unit.
AperiData’s core offering centres on transaction-level data analysis and automated financial assessment. Its technology categorises bank transaction feeds obtained via Open Banking consent to produce creditworthiness signals that are intended to supplement or replace traditional bureau scores in time-sensitive origination and collections decisions. That capability sits neatly alongside PayPoint’s existing multichannel payments infrastructure, which already spans direct debit, digital collections, Confirmation of Payee and API-led disbursement tools.
Simon Coles, managing director for digital payments and open banking at PayPoint, said the combination would help the company better support payment collection and arrears management across financial services, social housing, local government, utilities and charities, a client mix that already accounts for a significant share of the group’s Digital Payments revenues.
Prior collaboration and the FIS Customer Support Tool
The two companies have worked together since 2023, and the acquisition is therefore an internalisation of an existing partnership rather than an abrupt pivot. Their joint development of the Financial Information System Customer Support Tool, which was recognised as Business Partnership of the Year at the Credit and Collections Industry Awards 2024, provided the commercial proof of concept. That tool is designed to help organisations assess customers in financial difficulty using real-time account data, which aligns with the FCA‘s Consumer Duty expectations around fair treatment and appropriate forbearance.
No acquisition price was disclosed in the announcement beyond the previously stated £1million initial investment figure.
Market context and regulatory read-across
The Open Banking credit-decisioning space has attracted growing interest from both established credit reference agencies and specialist challengers. Traditional bureaux hold deep historical credit file data but are structurally slower to reflect real-time income and expenditure changes. Transaction-based scoring, by contrast, can reflect a customer’s current financial position almost immediately, which is particularly relevant for thin-file borrowers, recent migrants and consumers recovering from financial distress.
For PayPoint, the strategic logic is integration depth. Owning the data-analytics layer rather than sourcing it from a third party strengthens its proposition to collectors and lenders who already use its payments rails, and reduces the risk of the underlying capability being acquired by a competitor. The arrears-management segment, in particular, is under regulatory focus: the FCA’s Consumer Duty framework, which came into full effect for closed products in July 2024, places obligations on firms to identify customers in financial difficulty early and to offer appropriate support, creating demand for precisely the kind of real-time financial assessment AperiData provides.
AperiData will continue to operate as a standalone brand within the PayPoint Group and scale its solutions across the UK. The next markers to watch are whether the group pursues a formal credit reference agency registration and how AperiData’s data assets are surfaced across the wider PayPoint product stack.
