Thought Leadership

Event round-up: UK Open Banking Strategy Summit – the future of open banking

26 July 2024

OBL’s UK Open Banking Strategy Summit, kindly hosted by TrueLayer at its London office, kicked off with a bang as Marion King, Chair and Trustee of Open Banking Limited (OBL), announced that the UK can now count 10 million active open banking users.

The summit united the open banking ecosystem to celebrate six years of success and discuss the positive future for open banking, in light of the newly announced Data Information and Smart Data (DISD) Bill.

Panel 1: The Future is Open

The event was split into two panels: the first was a pre-cursor to ‘The Future is Open’ report, a forthcoming report on the future of open banking by consultancy Alvarez & Marsal, which served as live research for the study, due for publication later this year. Panellists were:

  • Ghela Boskovich, Head of Europe, Financial Data and Tech Association (FDATA)
  • Wayne Brown, Senior Director, Alvarez & Marsal
  • Andy Sacre, Head of Payments, Monzo
  • Francesco Simoneschi, CEO, TrueLayer
  • Henk Van Hulle, CEO, OBL

The panellists dissected the proposed DISD Bill and acknowledged the long-term challenges as well as the many opportunities for open banking and the ecosystem to capitalise on.

Marion King and Francesco Simoneschi opened the discussions with a brief overview of where open banking stood, landing an impactful message: there’s no blueprint for open banking.

Instead, it’s a collaborative effort where OBL’s trust framework helps the ecosystem flourish under the close supervision of regulators and policymakers. Simoneschi said that it was this very framework that attracted TrueLayer to move from San Francisco to the UK in 2016 and which fuels the company’s optimism for the next eight years.

Van Hulle emphasised the first order of business was to continue protecting the CMA Order and Open Banking Standard, and thanked those businesses that had voluntarily contributed to enable additional JROC workstreams to continue. He stressed the impact that the new DISD Bill would have on continuing to build the ecosystem. While this point was widely supported by the panellists, Boskovich also pointed out that it was vital for “regulators to push on as quickly as possible”.

Sacre pointed out that around six million of Monzo’s customers have used open banking – ranging from sharing their data to get better credit card rates, paying their tax bill, or connecting other bank accounts to their Monzo app so they can see everything in one place. He said, “the traction is really good, and we are seeing growth”.

When looking to the future of open banking, the conversation turned to the potential for the UK to expand standards beyond its geographic boundaries. Van Hulle underlined the importance of interoperability as standards expand internationally and discussed the UK’s initial success with 60 countries using OBL as a model for their implementation.

However, Sacre and Boskovich warned that competing international standards from countries such as Brazil and Singapore have used the UK’s initial hard work to create their own models, and push on beyond this, risking the UK losing its momentum.

Panel 2: Expanding the Horizons

The second session, Expanding the Horizons, featured the following panellists:

  • Anna Harvey, Deputy Director, Personal Finances & Funds, HM Treasury
  • Adam Jackson, Chief Strategy Officer, Innovate Finance
  • Phillip Mind, Director for Digital Technology and Innovation, UK Finance
  • Chris Pointon, Product Manager, ​Data Services, Icebreaker One
  • Luke Ryder, Policy and Strategy Director, OBL
  • Francesco Simoneschi, CEO, TrueLayer

Here the debate focused on how the DISD Bill can provide the necessary provisions for the evolution of OBL from an implementation entity into a future entity for open banking in the UK.

Harvey highlighted that the new Labour Government has prioritised innovation, and said that fintech will play a critical part in achieving its objectives. As a result, the DISD Bill is a priority among a packed legislative schedule and HM Treasury has been heavily involved in discussions with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Business and Trade about its implementation.

Both Jackson and Mind reiterated the benefits of the Bill, and stated their desire for the Government to take a firm grip on the future of open finance. Jackson specifically asked for the Government to lay out a roadmap, illustrating the steps towards “a production line for open finance”, exemplified by the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT’s) work on open finance use cases for SMEs and the financially vulnerable.

Mind called for detail on the legislative steps for the future entity for open banking and further information from the Government on the wider digital transformation of the UK economy.

Looking ahead to the expansion of open banking into open finance and beyond, Pointon gave advice on how best to manage a coalition of stakeholders – much like the open banking ecosystem. He stressed the importance of ecosystem collaboration, and the sharing of key use cases to ensure everyone is working towards the same direction, creating, as Ryder described, an “open finance mentality”.

Closing remarks

Closing the summit, Lord Iain McNicol, a Labour peer and keen advocate of open banking, gave his view on the future of open banking as well as the benefits that it is bringing to consumers.  

As Joint Chair of the Oversight Board of alternative lender, Salad Money, he cited the example of how the financial institution has used open banking data to lend more than £100m to people who would otherwise be excluded from the traditional lending market. 

As one of the few “non-party political” legislative issues, he pointed out that open banking has garnered support from Parliamentarians, consumers and businesses alike, continuing that there has never been a better time for its continued evolution. With a Labour Government determined to grow the economy and provide the stability needed for greater investment by the ecosystem, he concluded that all that is important now, “is delivering”.