The open infrastructure layer
for modern banking.
Banks, payments, standards, infrastructure and intelligence — structured for humans and machines. A neutral knowledge layer, not a bank.
A bank is a stack, not a building
Every bank — traditional or embedded — runs the same layered machine. Banking Foundation maps each layer to its standards and its technology providers.
Banks don't exist in isolation
A bank holds licenses in jurisdictions, answers to regulators, clears through payment networks and runs on technology providers. The diagram illustrates the relationship types the graph is designed to model. The seed-0.1 release ships domiciled_in, jurisdiction_regulator and peer edges in the API; clears_via and runs_on are on the roadmap.
Try it: open ICBC and follow its shipped connections, or fetch /api/v1/graph/banks/….
The global banking directory
28 systemically significant institutions across 7 types — commercial, central, digital, cooperative, development, private — each a structured entity with jurisdiction and regulator.
| Bank | Jurisdiction | Regulator | Assets ≈ |
|---|---|---|---|
| ICBCCommercial · Beijing | China | NFRA (China) | $6.3tn |
| JPMorgan ChaseCommercial · New York City | United States | Federal Reserve / OCC | $5.0tn |
| Bank of AmericaCommercial · Charlotte | United States | Federal Reserve / OCC | $3.5tn |
| HSBCCommercial · London | United Kingdom | PRA / FCA | $3.2tn |
| BNP ParibasCommercial · Paris | France | ECB (SSM) | $2.9tn |
| MUFGCommercial · Tokyo | Japan | JFSA | $2.7tn |
| CitigroupCommercial · New York City | United States | Federal Reserve / OCC | $2.7tn |
| Crédit AgricoleCooperative · Montrouge | France | ECB (SSM) | $2.6tn |
The global payment infrastructure map
16 networks and rails — card schemes, RTGS, instant payments, clearing and messaging — with operators, regions and settlement models.
Card payments
Schemes, issuing, acquiring — the four-party model
Instant payments
24/7 real-time rails: FedNow, SEPA Instant, UPI, Pix
Bank transfers
ACH, RTGS and high-value clearing
Cross-border
Correspondent banking, SWIFT, CIPS
Wallets & A2A
Account-to-account schemes and mobile wallets
Settlement
Where finality actually happens
Machine-readable banking standards
The protocols banking actually runs on — ISO 20022, EMV, PCI DSS, open-banking APIs — catalogued with their steward organizations and attribution. Banking Foundation documents standards; it does not own them.
The banking technology ecosystem
22 companies that banks and fintechs are actually built on — core banking, BaaS, payments, issuing, KYC, AML, open banking.
Core banking
Temenos · FIS · Fiserv · Jack Henry
4 providers →Cloud core / infrastructure
Thought Machine · Mambu
2 providers →Banking-as-a-Service
Solaris · ClearBank
2 providers →Payments processing
Adyen · Stripe · Checkout.com · Worldpay
4 providers →Card issuing
Marqeta · Lithic
2 providers →Open banking / data
Plaid · Tink · TrueLayer
3 providers →KYC / identity
Alloy · Onfido · Jumio
3 providers →AML / fraud
ComplyAdvantage · Feedzai
2 providers →Regulatory intelligence, honestly labeled
16 jurisdictions and 16 supervisory authorities: licenses, deposit insurance, open-banking regimes and instant-payment mandates. Dated, versioned and labeled by jurisdiction — sources carried at dataset level today, per-claim provenance on the roadmap; none of it is legal advice.
| Jurisdiction | Currency | Central bank | Open banking | Instant rail |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | USD | Federal Reserve | Market-driven; CFPB Section 1033 rule in flux | FedNow / RTP |
| European Union | EUR | European Central Bank | PSD2 (mandatory bank APIs) | SEPA Instant (SCT Inst) |
| United Kingdom | GBP | Bank of England | UK Open Banking (CMA9 mandate) | Faster Payments |
| Germany | EUR | Deutsche Bundesbank (Eurosystem) | PSD2 (mandatory bank APIs) | SEPA Instant |
| France | EUR | Banque de France (Eurosystem) | PSD2 (mandatory bank APIs) | SEPA Instant |
| Switzerland | CHF | Swiss National Bank | Market-driven (no statutory mandate) | SIC instant payments |
Infrastructure designed for humans and machines
AI agents are becoming participants in banking workflows — research, compliance, operations. They need structured entities and honest metadata, not scraped HTML. Every page here has an API twin and the whole map lives at /llms.txt.
Compliance agents
Resolve banks to jurisdictions, regulators and license context before a manual review.
Payment routing research
Which rails exist between two jurisdictions, and how they settle.
Vendor due diligence
Map the provider landscape per infrastructure layer, with categories and products.
The whole directory is an API
Open, versioned, no key required. JSON with CORS — usable from a browser, a backend, or an AI agent tool call.
Try it now — no signup:
Build on Banking Foundation
Use the open API as your reference layer for banks, rails, standards and regulation. Adopt the schema. The knowledge layer is free and open — the ecosystem grows on top.