Case studies

Simplify switching products and services with Smarter Contracts’ Pulse permissions protocol

02 April 2025

Access to many everyday services – bank statements, online shopping, travel bookings – require business owners and consumers to provide specific personal data, and to give clear consent as to how those businesses can legitimately use that data.

Managing data permissions can be a challenge. For consumers, it can be hard to remember what data has been shared, with whom and for how long they have granted access. A survey by password management firm, NordPass, revealed that the average internet user has 168 passwords to manage their online services.

Equally those companies need to ensure they capture, store and manage that data in a way that is both compliant with regulation, and which enables them to maximise its value, such as sending targeted offers.

To solve these challenges, fintech firm Smarter Contracts has built the Pulse Permissions Protocol™, which provides businesses with a single view of all their customer’s data permissions and preferences. Importantly, Pulse gives individuals full transparency over who has access to their data, who is it being shared with and for what purpose it is being used, together with clear controls to manage their data permissions via a single dashboard view.

This innovation draws upon open banking technology, widely regarded as the blueprint for consent-driven data sharing. Pulse adopts these same principles of consent management, trust and permission-based data sharing, ultimately giving customers control of their data.

The company

Founded in 2018 by CEO Wayne Lloyd, Smarter Contracts was one of the winners of the Department of Business and Trade’s 2024 Smart Data Discovery Challenge, held to find innovative uses of open data to deliver public benefits.

Digital Financial Health Monitor

Smarter Contracts’ winning entry was a Digital Financial Health Monitor, which was designed by Chief Product Officer, Dan Weaver. The monitor, powered by the Pulse Permissions Protocol®, is an online financial assistant which provides consumers with personalised money-saving comparison offers. It aims to help consumers find and switch to better deals without having to remember when contracts or policies, such as mortgages or insurance, are about to expire.

This helps to tackle the loyalty penalty – the difference between what new and existing customers pay for household services. It also picks up when new products enter the market, such as credit cards or savings, and when interest rates change, to help consumers shop around for, or switch to, better value goods and services.

The company estimates that this could help consumers make cost savings of up to £1,500 per year and save individuals six hours of time and effort to switch. This, in turn, could create more competitive marketplaces, potentially generating up to £2bn of economic benefits annually.

Pain-free switching

Weaver explained: “By designing our solution as an application on top of the Pulse Permissions Protocol, you can see the new levels of consumer empowerment we can unlock: ‘It’s my data. I can work with it’.  As such, consumers can consent to always-on monitoring of their chosen products and services, receiving alerts when any deals expire, checking whether they are on the most appropriate product or service, and making switching as simple and pain-free as possible.”

“The standards of permissions management that Pulse facilitates, means we can create trusted and personalised services, such as offering the right product at the right time. Importantly, consumers can also change their mind, pause, limit, revoke or renew their consents at any time, which builds consumer trust in data and data sharing.”

Daniel Weaver, Chief Product Officer, Smarter Contracts

For businesses, Pulse provides a real-time view over how they can share and process their customers’ data, helping to improve compliance and data governance standards, while reducing customer churn. It does this by capturing, storing and automating the management of any type of data permission, under any regulation, and for any permission type, including time-bound, delegated and multi-party permissions.

By automating the management of these permissions, the protocol not only helps businesses strip out manual systems and processes, it also allows them to deliver and share the right messaging at the right time across any data network. Its built-in audit and regulation layer ensures risk can be managed in real-time, including risks relating to the use of AI, by managing the governance around it.

How it works

The Pulse Permissions Protocol is patent-pending software that utilises blockchain features and is designed to be simple for businesses to integrate into their technical environments. It can be easily embedded into the customer touch points of the business licensing the software. Once that’s done, the protocol manages the rest.

Looking ahead to a smart data economy

Open banking has highlighted the extensive range of opportunities that can benefit consumers and businesses when customers are put in control of their data, and Smarter Contracts’ Pulse is just one example of this. The Department for Business and Trade estimates that future commercial opportunities created by personal data mobility have the potential to increase GDP by £28bn.

Weaver concluded: “In the near future, many, many new data sets will be available and accessed entirely through customer consent, so being able to access, use and combine these data sets, from different sectors – open energy, open property, open finance etc – will create fantastic opportunities for those that can build the value exchange and trust with customers. And that’s the meaning of smart data.”

Notes to editors

Open Banking Limited does not endorse any of the products or companies mentioned here.

If you would like to share your organisation’s experience of open banking, please email us at press@openbanking.org.uk. 

If you would like to talk to one of our team about how open banking could help your business, please email us at enquiries@openbanking.org.uk.