Didier Baclin, head of bank build at Zopa, looks at the state of Open Banking.
Ask anyone who’s shopped around for a new financial product, or tried to switch their existing accounts, and they’ll tell you that the process is painful. Even simply keeping track of all of your different accounts has been difficult enough. Roll on 2018, and there were finally signs that our financial lives were about to get much easier when a new set of rules were introduced – the UK’s Open Banking initiative and its European relative PSD2.
Open Banking was brought into life by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Her Majesty’s Treasury (HMT) to drive more competition in the current account market. It introduced a safe and standardised way for customers to share their banking data with regulated third parties. Those third parties are the companies that are trying to help consumers do much more with their data than a traditional bank does....