Head to head · Bank accounts · October 2026 research run

Belvo vs TrueLayer

Belvo scores 63.5 (B) on agent readiness against TrueLayer's 62.1 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. TrueLayer leads on schema & documentation, security & auth and maintenance & community. Both do bank accounts.

Which one, for what

Belvo B

Good for Lenders and fintechs that need consented bank data in Brazil, employment or tax records in Mexico, or Pix and direct debit collection, and can sign a contract.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 84 against 71
  • Agent ergonomics, 80 against 73
  • Payments & pricing, 20 against 10

Watch for

Production keys follow a sales meeting, a certification call with a Belvo engineer and a paid plan from 1,000 USD a month

TrueLayer B

Good for UK data and payments from one licensed vendor, with EEA coverage through the Irish entity on Data v1.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 89 against 80
  • Security & auth, 66 against 57
  • Maintenance & community, 38 against 30

Watch for

No public pricing anywhere on the site or in the docs

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBelvoTrueLayerEdge
Reliability16%208471Belvo +13
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28089TrueLayer +9
Agent ergonomics13%16.28073Belvo +7
Security & auth14%17.55766TrueLayer +9
Payments & pricing10%12.52010Belvo +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83038TrueLayer +8
Transparency & trust7%8.86462Belvo +2
Negative events≤1500
Total63.5 · B62.1 · B

Facts side by side

FactBelvoTrueLayer
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorBelvoTrueLayer
Hosted endpointhttps://api.belvo.comhttps://api.truelayer.com
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth
PricingPaidPaid
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Belvo's General Conditions of Service Usage. The belvo npm package (0.28.0) is MITApache-2.0 or MIT (signing libraries)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-08-102026-06-25
Terms last updated2025-01-102026-05-12
Privacy policy last updated2021-02-222026-05-12
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textyes
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularity1.1k npm/wk, 240 PyPI/wk23 stars, 17k npm/wk
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (2)

Verdicts

Belvo

Belvo publishes a 146-operation OpenAPI file, an llms.txt with a Markdown twin of each docs page, and list endpoints with field selection and pages of up to 1,000. Production access needs a sales meeting, a certification call and a paid plan from 1,000 USD a month, and no changelog or maintained SDK was found.

TrueLayer

FCA and Central Bank of Ireland authorised, holding the AISP and PISP licences itself. No public pricing anywhere on the site or in the docs.

Before you call either

Belvo

  1. Send HTTP Basic with secretId as username and secretPassword as password to https://sandbox.belvo.com, and switch to https://api.belvo.com only with production keys
  2. Create links through the Hosted Widget with a token from POST /api/token/, which expires after 10 minutes
  3. Read stored data with GET list calls. Each POST retrieval in Brazil counts against monthly Open Finance limits, such as 8 a month per CPF for owners and accounts
  4. Retry 50x responses up to five times from a 3 second base with a factor of two, and don't retry 40x apart from too_many_sessions
  5. Send Belvo-Idempotency-Key with a UUID when creating a payment intent, and X-Belvo-Request-Mode: async on link deletion to avoid the limit of 5 deletions a minute

TrueLayer

  1. Use auth.truelayer-sandbox.com and api.truelayer-sandbox.com with a separate sandbox client; live credentials don't work there
  2. Send the user's IP when they're present, or a bank allows 4 calls a day per account
  3. Check the retry column of the Data API error table before retrying; codes marked No need the user or a config fix
  4. Set data_access_type to one_time for a single read and skip the 90-day reauthorisation
  5. Append .md to any docs URL to get the page as Markdown

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Belvo or TrueLayer?

Belvo scores 63.5 (B) on agent readiness against TrueLayer's 62.1 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. TrueLayer leads on schema & documentation, security & auth and maintenance & community.

Do Belvo and TrueLayer need an API key?

Belvo needs an API key. TrueLayer uses an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Belvo and TrueLayer without installing anything?

Yes. Belvo has a hosted endpoint at https://api.belvo.com and TrueLayer at https://api.truelayer.com.

Other comparisons with Belvo or TrueLayer

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.