Powens, a European open finance infrastructure provider, has launched an AI system that builds new financial data connectors and repairs broken ones, cutting a typical repair from up to two days to 10 to 15 minutes. Announced in Paris on October 28, 2026, the Connector Agentic Factory already builds connectors within a couple of hours, against up to three weeks by hand, and has delivered 12 new connectors across Europe, spanning banking, wealth and document data sources.
What A Connector Does, And Why It Breaks
Connectors are the technical links that let banks, fintechs and financial apps securely retrieve a customer’s financial data, or make payments, from a bank or another institution. Powens maintains more than 1,800 of them across Europe, and they underpin the services offered by more than 300 banks, wealth managers, lenders, fintech providers and accounting software companies. When a bank changes its website or systems, its connector can break, and every app that depends on it loses access until an engineer fixes the link.
Until now, that repair could take up to two days of engineering work, and building a new connector from scratch could take up to three weeks. The Connector Agentic Factory changes both numbers. To build a new connector, the system examines how a given institution’s systems work and creates the connection accordingly within a couple of hours. To repair an existing one, it investigates what went wrong and proposes a fix, which Powens engineers then check before it goes live.
The approval rate is the number to watch. Powens says 50% of the system’s proposed fixes are directly approved by its engineers, a rate it says keeps improving as the system matures. That still leaves half of all fixes needing rework or rejection, a reminder that this is an assistant for engineers, not a replacement for them.
Humans Stay In The Loop
Powens is emphatic on oversight. Every proposed connector or fix is checked and approved by Powens engineers before it goes live, and the AI does not manipulate data or payments. It is used exclusively to build and maintain connectors that remain deterministic and secure in nature, a deliberate boundary that matters in financial infrastructure, where a wrong data mapping or a stray payment instruction would be far more costly than a slow repair.
That design echoes a wider pattern in enterprise AI: agents are being trusted with preparation and diagnosis, while humans keep the final decision, as in Dayforce’s agentic platform for workforce decisions and OLX’s agentic selling tools, where human control is presented as the feature, not the fallback. Powens’ version is stricter than most, because the company frames the human check as a guarantee of reliability and accountability that the financial industry demands, not merely a safety net.
Where It Works Today
The system can already be used to repair any Powens connector, while its connector-building capability currently focuses on investment and savings, with plans to extend to additional connector types in the coming months. That sequencing makes sense: repairs are the daily pain for existing customers, while new coverage is how Powens grows, and proving the factory on repairs first builds the trust needed to let it build more.
The announcement comes days after the Connector Agentic Factory was named Best Use of AI in Open Finance at the Open Banking Expo Awards on October 13 in London, an early external validation for a system Powens describes as a proof point for applying AI safely within regulated financial infrastructure. The company expects to extend the same approach to other parts of its platform over time.
“Our ambition is to unlock the full potential of Open Finance and build the best infrastructure in Europe, covering every type of data and delivering unparalleled levels of quality and coverage in every market we serve,” said Jean Guillaume, Powens’ chief executive. “Powens’ Connector Agentic Factory is a direct expression of that ambition: AI lets us raise the bar on reliability and extend our coverage across Europe faster, without ever compromising on control.” Chief product and technology officer Fabien Oliveira added that engineers now spend less time on repetitive diagnostic work and more on higher-value activities such as improving the factory itself.
Why It Matters
This matters because open finance runs on unglamorous plumbing, and broken plumbing is what users actually notice: a bank feed that stops syncing, a budgeting app that goes stale, a lender that cannot verify income. Cutting repair times from days to minutes, and build times from weeks to hours, directly improves the reliability of hundreds of consumer and business services. The model also offers a template for regulated AI adoption, where the agent does the diagnosing and drafting while humans keep the signature, a balance that Akamai’s agent sandbox approach applies to code execution.
Background
Powens describes itself as the largest independent open finance platform in the EU, serving more than 300 banks, wealth managers, lenders, fintechs and accounting software providers across Western Europe and Mexico, connecting more than 1,800 financial institutions through a single API that combines data aggregation with embedded payments.
Source: Powens announcement
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