Open Banking Consent Expires Every 90 Days. Your Software Should Handle the Renewal, Not You.
The 90-Day Bank Connection Problem Most Accounting Software Still Leaves to You
---
Last Thursday, somewhere in France, a small business owner opened their accounting software to check the morning's transactions and found nothing. No entries since the previous Friday. No balance update. The bank feed had gone dark.
Not a hack. Not a system failure. Their Open Banking consent — the permission that lets accounting software read bank transactions — had expired after 90 days. Nobody renewed it in time.
While they figure out the reconnection process, five business days of transactions are missing. They'll reconcile them manually. If their DSN — the monthly social security declaration, the Déclaration Sociale Nominative, due to URSSAF (the agency that collects social contributions) — falls during those missing days, the payroll numbers won't balance. Late DSN filings cost €58.88 per employee per month. For a restaurant with 8 employees, that's €471 for a problem a software reminder could have prevented — or better, that software automation should have made impossible.
---
What PSD2 actually requires and why it keeps breaking things
PSD2 is the EU banking regulation — Directive 2015/2366 — that requires banks to share your transaction data with authorized software. The rule exists to benefit businesses: rather than manually downloading statements from your bank portal, your accounting software connects directly to your bank and pulls transactions automatically.
There's a catch written into the regulation. Every 90 days, you must re-confirm that the software can still access your account. This is called Strong Customer Authentication — you log in through your bank, confirm your identity, and re-authorize the connection. Then the 90-day clock restarts.
For a business with accounts at two banks, that means up to 8 re-authentications per year. Three banks: up to 12. Each requires logging into your bank portal, finding the re-authorization screen — often buried in settings — and completing the confirmation. Each takes 15 to 30 minutes if you know where to look. Each carries the risk that you don't do it within the window and your bank feed stops.
---
What the data gap actually costs
When bank consent expires, transactions stop appearing. Most accounting software doesn't flag this clearly — the feed just goes quiet. Business owners often don't notice for two to five days. During that window, they make financial decisions on stale numbers.
A supplier payment approved because "the balance looked fine." A payroll run calculated without the last week's income. A cash flow estimate sent to the bank based on a figure that was three days old. These are real decisions made on incomplete information, and the information gap was predictable and preventable.
Add the downstream costs: the accountant who notices the gap days later spends two to four hours reconciling manually, typically billed at €60-100 per hour. If the gap spans a filing deadline — URSSAF's DSN is due by the 5th or 15th each month — the business faces a late filing penalty that has nothing to do with their actual finances.
"Your bank built the API. Your software charges you €200 a month to use it. Every 90 days, they still make you do the paperwork to keep it connected. That's three failures stacked on top of each other."
---
Eight years of a known problem, unsolved
Eight years have passed since PSD2 came into force in January 2018. The 90-day consent rule was in the Regulatory Technical Standards from the beginning. French accounting software vendors — Sage, Cegid, Pennylane — have known about it since the start.
The technology to automate renewal exists. Powens (formerly Budget Insight) is a French aggregator connecting accounting software to 1,800+ banks across Europe. Its API supports automatic consent renewal. Bridge by Bankin', another French aggregator, offers the same capability. These companies built the infrastructure that makes invisible renewal possible.
Sage and Cegid route their bank connections through these aggregators, pay for the service, and still send you an email when your consent is about to expire.
Count how many times their marketing pages mention automatic consent renewal. The number is zero. They talk about "bank connectivity" and "Open Banking integration" — not the 90-day requirement. If they'd solved it, they'd advertise it.
---
Why vendors don't fix what they could fix
Accounting software vendors have no financial incentive to automate consent renewal. When your bank feed breaks, you call support. Support walks you through reconnection — 30 minutes, sometimes more. The interaction keeps you engaged with the platform. Engaged users don't cancel subscriptions. The vendor gets paid next month whether the renewal was automatic or manual.
Pennylane recently raised €175 million at a €3.6 billion valuation. Sage has 300,000+ French customers paying €80-200 per month. These are not resource-constrained companies. They have the engineering budget. They have the aggregator relationships. The renewal problem persists because fixing it doesn't generate revenue — it just removes friction that keeps users attached.
---
What Liberté does differently
With Liberté, bank reconciliation connects via PSD2 Open Banking through Powens, which links 1,800+ banks. Consent renewal is handled automatically, five days before each expiration, without any action required from the business owner.
On Liberté, the 90-day window becomes invisible. You authorize the bank connection once. The platform tracks the expiration date. At day 85, it renews the consent through the aggregator API. At day 90, nothing happens to your bank feed — because the connection was already renewed. You don't receive an email. You don't log into your bank portal. You don't click anything.
Each renewal is logged with a timestamp in your compliance record. If anyone ever questions your bank data continuity — for an audit, a financing application, or a dispute — you have documented proof that data was uninterrupted.
---
What this means for your monthly close
Accurate bank reconciliation is the foundation of reliable accounting. Your DSN declaration to URSSAF pulls from payroll data. Your payroll data reconciles against bank transactions. Your FEC — the standardized accounting file the tax authority can demand with 15 days' notice — requires a complete and accurate transaction ledger.
All three are only as good as the bank data they're built on.
One expired consent during month-end close means your accountant is working with incomplete data. Transactions from three days ago aren't reconciled. The DSN numbers might not match the actual payroll. The FEC has a gap. These aren't hypothetical risks — they're the chain of consequences that flows from a 90-day window your software didn't track.
Breaking this chain entirely is what Liberté does. Bank data flows continuously because consent never lapses.
---
The question to ask your accountant this week
Right now, one of your bank consents is somewhere in its 90-day countdown. You probably don't know which account or when. When it expires, the data will stop flowing. You may not notice for a few days.
Ask your accountant: in the past year, did any of your bank connections stop syncing for more than a day? Ask them to estimate the hours spent reconnecting and reconciling after each gap. Ask what those hours cost. The number you get is what automatic renewal would have saved.
Join the waitlist at liberte.free. Launch is Q2 2026, France first.
Your cash position should be current every morning. The 90-day requirement is a regulation your software should handle. The fact that most don't is a choice — not a technical limitation. Liberté made a different choice.