We used TrueLayer because they also did screen-scraping for us, and they have “smoothed over” lots of the minor differences between the APIs. It is exceptionally difficult to get a “perfect” implementation and even Monzo deviates from the standard in some very minor ways because it’s just impossible for us to conform to it.
When this happens, Open Banking ask us to give feedback so they can refine the standard - and we will certainly continue doing this.
Now that we have much more experience with Open Banking we might decide to go direct to other banks ourselves - but no immediate plans to do that.
I’m not worried that the standard will stifle innovation - if anything it will enable it. What I don’t like is the lack of focus on “real time”. Webhooks are important, and third parties should be able to access the data more than 4 times a day. Monzo now have a public policy team, and we are working hard to give feedback to everyone responsible for Open Banking to set the tone for the next version.