Latest update
There is a breaking change which impacts all TPPs and open banking services.
On 1 January 2025, Coventry Building Society (the Society) purchased The Co-operative Bank (the Bank). We’re now working on the next steps to bring our organisations together. To do this we’re proposing to transfer the Bank’s business, including smile, to the Society.
As a result, the existing Co-operative Bank registration on the Open Banking Directory will be migrated to the Coventry Building Society registration in January 2027.
This means that TPPs will need to send their x-fapi-financial-id header to the Coventry Building Society identifier instead of the Co-operative Bank identifier (0015800001HQQskAAH). The Coventry Building Society identifier TPPs will need to use is 0014H00001lFE3cQAG.
New certificates and SSA will be available on the Coventry Building Society Open Banking Ltd Directory registration. Please use a new OBSEAL certificate for the new SSA for the x-jws-signature validation for PISP journeys.
Our sandbox environment has been amended and you are able to test the change. You will need to obtain certificates from the Coventry Building Society Directory registration.
Further details can be found here.
We have a breaking change which impacts AIS journeys. The optional 'TransactionId' field will be removed from the information returned to TPPs. This is to resolve an issue where inaccurate transaction details are returned.
Details about the 'TransactionId' field can be found in our AIS API documentation.
This change was implemented to our sandbox environment in June for testing and we intend to implement this change within our Production environment on 15 October 2026.
Latest service updates
If you’re experiencing an issue with accessing one of our services, or you would like to know about any planned changes, you can:
Check the status of our services
Report an issue with our services
Not a developer?
You can read more about:
How to get started
Follow these steps to register as a third party provider (TPP) with us and start developing your services:
Provide us with details of your organisation and your credentials and send it by secure email.
Our team will do the necessary checks and once complete, we’ll confirm you as a TPP.
Once we’ve sent you confirmation, you can start testing your Open Banking services.
Explore our APIs (application programme interface)
Read more about our range of Open Banking APIs that you can use to develop, test, and launch secure Open Banking services. Available for both The Co-operative Bank and smile.
AIS (Account Information Service)
Retrieves our customers’ account information and transaction data.
PIS (Payment Initiation Service)
Allows you to set-up and submit payments on our customers’ behalf.
CBPI (Card-Based Payment Instrument)
Allows you to receive authorised confirmation of customers’ funds.
And you can read about general settings and specifications which apply to all our APIs.
Our brands
The Co-operative Bank and smile are trading names of The Co-operative Bank p.l.c. We offer Open Banking functionality for both these brands.
The Co-operative Bank
smile
We don’t offer Open Banking functionality for our brand: The Co-operative Bank for Intermediaries.
FAQs (frequently asked questions)
How does a TPP onboard with the Bank?
We’re operating a manual onboarding process.
You just need to request a secure email account, then send us some documentation, and complete and send our onboarding form.
We’ll then run some checks and onboard you if we have all the information we need.
How can a TPP report a problem?
If you’ve checked our help and support pages and you need further support, please let us know by contacting our TPP support team.
Performance and availability data
We publish data on the service quality of our Open Banking platform. This details how well it’s performing, based on how secure it is and how consistently you’re able to access it.
View our Open Banking performance and availability data - The Co-operative Bank.