Insight Type: Case studies

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.

In late 2023, payment systems provider PayPoint and credit reference agency AperiData announced a pilot project to use open banking data to support Citizens Advice Stevenage with its handling of debt assessments.

The independent advice charity estimates that its advisers spend around 30% of their time sorting through clients’ paperwork to complete the financial assessment process, handling up to 600 different data points covering income, expenditure and debt, before it can advise clients on their options. This manual process can take several weeks, particularly if paperwork is missing.

With an average debt of around £65,000 per household in the UK, advisers at the national charity face increased demand for support (it helped 2.5 million people in 2024), particularly one-to-one sessions, but its capacity to meet that rising demand was limited. One of the pilot’s key aims was to automate key manual tasks and allow Citizens Advice to focus its resources on providing real value to those in need, freeing staff up to assist an additional 150,000 clients annually across the whole network.

Faster financial reviews

PayPoint’s Financial Information Service (FIS) Customer Support Tool enables clients to consent to a near real-time review of their finances, using open banking data, in a safe environment. The tool, which was co-developed with AperiData, automates 540 of the 600 data points used in a standard financial assessment. The data assessment can now take less than one minute, which makes it less stressful for clients and more streamlined for advisers.

As well as reducing the time spent on manual data entry, advisers at the Stevenage office were able to offer online support to clients who couldn’t undertake a face-to-face visit.

“There are several routine challenges in assisting people with advice on their financial circumstances. These include relying on supplied paperwork to be accurate and up to date, lengthy waits for new statements or bills requested from suppliers or banks and the fact that sometimes, by the time our advisers have the information they need, someone’s financial circumstances may have evolved. 

Charlotte Blizzard-Welch, CEO, Citizens Advice Stevenage

She continued: “The trial of PayPoint’s FIS tool enabled our advisers to achieve an almost instant, real-time view of people’s financial circumstances, meaning they can offer their advice faster and more efficiently and reduce the number of clients who drop out of support because of difficulty in gathering data. Its impact upon wider application, in increasing the number of people we can help take action against debt, are hard to overestimate.”

The Stevenage pilot – one year on

Looking back on the first year of the programme, Ryann Hansen, Advice Quality and Operations Manager, Citizens Advice Stevenage, commented: “I’m responsible for overseeing our advice services and ensuring the quality of the advice we provide to our clients. Having been a part of the Customer Service Tools journey over the past year, I’ve seen its impact on allowing us to assist clients to better understand their finances and enable us to provide even more detailed financial capability and sustainability advice. It has also allowed us to spend more time talking to clients because it has reduced the casework admin involved in bank statement analysis.”

He added that the tool was up and running, and advisers confident in using the platform, in the space of just one month.

Case study – highlighting non-essential spending

Hannah*, a young single parent to three children, showed signs of overspending during a phone conversation about her finances. She agreed to use the FIS Tool, which allowed her to provide necessary information quickly.

The FIS Tool revealed that a large part of Hannah’s income was spent on eating out and leisure, rather than paying priority bills such as rent or council tax.

This insight led to a focused conversation with Hannah about budgeting, paying rent through Universal Credit, and setting limits for non-essential spending.

Cost and time savings

The Stevenage office calculates that the FIS tool has enabled advisers to assist on 51 occasions for 39 clients, offering an average time saving of three hours and reduced attrition. Eliminating the need for paper files and reduced printing costs has also meant an average cost saving of £50 per case.

Clients commented on the simplicity of the consent journey, and the ease of getting the relevant information to advisers.

Case study – signposting to professional help

Jane* appeared motivated to address her debt, but she had struggled to send bank statements for four months, and without the bank statements, the debt advice process stalled. The team offered Jane the option to use the FIS Tool, which she accepted over a phone call.

On reviewing the statements generated by the FIS Tool, it became clear that Jane had a gambling problem, spending heavily at online betting outlets.

With her consent, she was referred for help with her gambling addiction. The FIS Tool was instrumental in quickly identifying the problem and enabling timely intervention.

*Details have been anonymised. File imagery.

The Stevenage team found that the tool gave them a more up-to-date view of clients’ finances, improving the accuracy of assessments, while still incorporating the key human element of advice. Clients have benefited from improved financial wellbeing and resilience.

Following the success of the Stevenage pilot, PayPoint’s FIS Customer Support Tool has been rolled out to other CAB branches throughout the UK, including Cambridge, Dover, Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford.

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.

Mobile network operator Vodafone launched ‘VOXI For Now’, the UK’s first mobile social tariff, back in 2020 initially to help support people who had been affected by unemployment following the pandemic.

However, the popularity of the service prompted Vodafone to extend the tariff to individuals receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance, Disability Allowance, Personal Independent Payment, Employment and Support Allowance, or employment-based Universal Credit.

Vodafone had initially used a manual system to check applicants’ eligibility for the tariff, but as demand for it grew, it became clear that the team needed to speed up onboarding for customers, as well as streamline the time and effort spent on administration.

Open banking solution
The VOXI team worked with FCA-regulated fintech firm Moneyhub to provide an open banking-powered solution to reduce friction in the eligibility-checking process, enabling eligible applicants to access the tariff quickly.

Open banking solution
The VOXI team worked with FCA-regulated fintech firm Moneyhub to provide an open banking-powered solution to reduce friction in the eligibility-checking process, enabling eligible applicants to access the tariff quickly.

One-off consent

As part of the sign-up process, applicants are asked to give Moneyhub one-off consent to access their benefit-receiving bank account(s) via an open banking connection. This checks for evidence of benefits being paid into their account.

Within seconds, Moneyhub’s Eligibility Checking technology can verify what state benefits applicants are receiving, and notify the VOXI system if they are eligible for the social tariff. Importantly, the verification process doesn’t affect individuals’ credit scores or involve any data sharing or transfers between the two businesses.

With near real-time verification, Moneyhub’s platform has enabled eligible recipients to access the social tariff in a much shorter time frame.

Scott Currie, Head of VOXI at Vodafone, said: “We launched VOXI For Now to help those who need it most, providing unlimited data, calls and texts at a heavily discounted rate for those receiving government benefits.

“Utilising Moneyhub’s open finance technology, we have been able to streamline the automated eligibility checking. This means VOXI customers no longer have to wait for a manual verification; which means we can get people who are typically financially underserved connected to the services they need faster.”

Scott Currie, Head of VOXI, Vodafone

Supporting financial education

VOXI has also partnered with Moneyhub to offer customers 12 months of free access to its consumer app (which usually costs £14.99 a year) through the VOXI Drop initiative – a customer loyalty and benefits programme with monthly rewards spanning beauty, tech, food and more.

The Moneyhub app allows VOXI customers to connect different financial accounts – current, savings, mortgages, pensions, credit cards, investments – to get a clear picture of all their finances in one place. They can also choose from a suite of tools to help them understand their money and reach their financial goals, including budget management, spending analysis, savings goals and rent recognition.

With Moneyhub’s recent financial wellbeing research* revealing that more than 50 per cent of Generation Z were concerned about their financial situation, VOXI wanted to support its customers’ financial health, and enable them to better understand and manage their money.

The results

The response from VOXI customers has so far been positive, with customers making quick use of the insights to help manage spending and set up savings goals. This has resulted in an average eightfold increase in savings pots within six months of using the dashboard.

VOXI also receives anonymised, aggregated insights into customer spending habits, which it uses using to support customer engagement strategies, and offer personalised VOXI Drop rewards.

“We are delighted to be partnering with VOXI by Vodafone to help get this technology into their customers’ hands. Through the cost of living crisis and beyond, consumers need simple and accessible ways to manage their finances which focus on supporting financial wellness.

Dan Scholey, Chief Commercial Officer, Moneyhub

He continued: “VOXI offering access to the Moneyhub app via VOXI Drop has the potential to make a significant difference to their customers, as it can genuinely help people better understand their finances and embed healthier money habits now, and for the long term.”

*About the research: The research was commissioned by Moneyhub and conducted by Censuswide with 2,000 Nationally representative general consumers between 27.10.23 – 31.10.23. Censuswide abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society which is based on the ESOMAR principles and are members of The British Polling Council.

Every autumn, many university and higher education students are faced with the task of managing their own finances for the first time – tuition fees, accommodation costs and essential course materials all have to be factored into their personal budget. This can be quite a daunting task, particularly for students who don’t have any previous experience of handling money.

With the Student Loans Company estimating that the average student debt in the UK is expected to be £42,900 for those starting in the system during 2023-24, the importance of understanding basic finances – money coming in, versus money going out – can’t be underestimated. 

This is where financial education platform Blackbullion can help. The company, founded in 2014 by CEO Vivi Friedgut, has financial literacy and inclusion at its core, and aims to help students in higher education to ‘get smart with money’ and better understand their finances, both at university, and as a key life skill for their future.

Blackbullion’s money management app was one of the first built exclusively for students, and offers complete visibility of all a student’s finances in one place. The app enables them to set their own budget and create customised spending categories, based on spending insights informed by open banking connections. It also suggests areas where they can save.

Students can earn rewards for sticking to their budget with the ‘bullions currency’, which can be exchanged for prizes.

Hub of student funds

As well as offering its own custom-built money management app and educational tools, Blackbullion has built the UK’s largest hub of student support funds, bursaries, scholarships and hardship grants [it is an authorised government provider] and enables eligible students to apply directly for additional financial support via its Funds Management System [FMS].

Both the app and the FMS use an open banking solution, provided by data intelligence company Bud, to analyse bank data in near real-time, and simplify and speed up the application process.

Historically, students needed to manually download, submit and annotate a series of bank statements to prove their eligibility for funding. Not only was this a time-consuming process, sometimes involving a physical visit to their bank, it also slowed down access to much-needed funds.

Bud’s Assess solution gives students the option to consent to connect their bank account to their application so this evidence can be automatically applied. This means they can now provide proof of their financial incomings and outgoings in just a few minutes, as opposed to several days, and get a decision, and funding, more quickly.

The solution uses the same secure technology as high street banks, and third party open banking providers such as Bud, are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

The hub makes funds available from both educational institutions – many universities offer their own hardship schemes – as well as third party providers. Blackbullion partners with more than 60 universities and colleges across the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and, to date, has facilitated the distribution of more than £17 million in funds to students.

Efficiencies for universities

As well as speeding up access to funds for students, the FMS also offers participating universities and educational institutions time and cost efficiencies. For example, having direct access to students’ latest bank data eliminates the risk of incorrect bank statement periods, inaccurate account numbers, or missing annotations.

Blackbullion estimates that using the FMS makes it two to four times faster for staff to process and allocate fund applications, and results in a 25% reduction in finance and administration costs for this task.

Abi Keay, Financial Support Manager at Keele University, commented: “Open banking has been a game changer for our Hardship Fund processing at Keele, and has improved our own experience of processing applications as well as students’ experiences of applying.

“At first, I was unsure whether students would be too cautious about it, but we’ve seen very few students this year opt to provide bank statements manually. The vast majority have chosen open banking to support their Hardship Fund applications and it’s not hard to understand why.”  

Financial resilience

The financial data that Blackbullion aggregates (£420 million of spend history, £415 million of income history, across 15 million transactions) enables the firm to build a deep understanding of students’ financial behaviour, and to continue to develop relevant resources to further their financial education.

Its Financial Wellbeing Score combines transaction history, financial education, and financial resilience to produce an assessment of a student’s financial health, building a profile of their individual ‘money personality’ and ‘nudging’ them to targeted articles on its learning platform.

Developing corporate scholarships

Blackbullion also founded the UK’s National Scholarships Week, supported by higher education regulator the Office for Students, and in April 2024 facilitated the distribution of £800,000 worth of funding, covering 75 scholarships from organisations such as the Chaucer Group, Stack Infrastructure, FTI Consulting and engineering company Accu.

Vivi summarises the financial platform’s success.

More than 300,000 students have engaged with the Blackbullion universe, whether it’s learning key money skills like crypto, investing and credit scoring, searching for additional funding from major companies (we have over £25m worth of scholarships available from Amazon, Nationwide and others), managing their money on the app, or developing a better financial wellbeing score using our brand new tool.”

All of this combines to help equip students for a secure financial future.

CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) has been a key player in international aid and development since the 1960s. The charity provides relief programmes, in conjunction with local partner organisations, in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.  

Known for its innovative fundraising approaches, the charity is now exploring the potential of open banking to enhance its digital payments and fundraising efforts. It aims to do this in two ways: improving its donor experience and streamlining operational efficiency.

A digital fundraising strategy

CAFOD’s digital fundraising team focuses on integrating technology to meet supporters’ evolving needs and preferences. The team achieves this through a variety of digital tools and channels to facilitate donations, including online, ‘text giving’ via SMS, and contactless payment options within the Catholic Church and other community spaces.

Therese Wynn-Davies is the Digital Fundraising Manager at CAFOD. As the charity has continued to innovate, she explained that it had identified several pain points related to traditional payment methods.

Costly transaction fees for charities

She highlighted the significant impact of transaction fees on the charity’s funds, pointing out that the costly fees associated with some credit cards and donation platforms reduced the amount of funds available for its international relief programmes. This prompted the charity to seek a more efficient and transparent donation process.

“Our digital fundraising team prides itself on being as innovative as possible and staying ahead of trends,” Therese explained.

“We need to be where our supporters are, or even ahead of them, to ensure we meet their expectations and provide a seamless donation experience.” This includes open banking.

Transaction fees from more traditional digital payment methods can significantly reduce the amount of money that reaches CAFOD’s programmes. For instance, a £100 donation via credit card could incur fees of up to 3%*, meaning that only £97 goes towards CAFOD’s work. Multiplied across thousands of donations, these fees accumulate, diverting crucial funds away from the charity’s mission.

Donor concern about fees

Similarly, feedback on the percentage taken via fundraising platforms has been a source of concern for some donors.

Therese said, “We’ve listened to our supporters’ feedback about transaction fees, which meant looking at options for directly addressing these concerns.

“By offering a fee-free alternative, we can show our donors that we value their contributions and are committed to ensuring their donations have the maximum possible impact.”

Open banking offers a solution by providing a direct bank transfer method that bypasses the need for traditional card networks and their associated fees. This means that nearly 100% of the donated funds can go directly to the intended causes, maximising the impact of every donation.

The open banking journey

CAFOD’s journey into open banking began with a website refresh incorporating a new donation process. During this update, the team discovered a payments platform that offers an open banking-enabled payment solution to charities, social enterprises and small businesses.

Wonderful’s account-to-account platform allows donors to make direct donations to CAFOD, eliminating the fees associated with banking, or charity platform, transactions. Importantly for CAFOD, Wonderful is fee-free for charities.

The charity is currently in the process of implementing open banking through Wonderful, due towards the end of 2024. Its initial phase focuses on offering online donors open banking as a payment option.

Part of this process involves educating CAFOD’s support teams to ensure a smooth transition and readiness for donor enquiries. Its follow-up work will expand the option to parish fundraising teams and the broader supporter base.

By implementing open banking, CAFOD aims to provide donors with a secure (open banking is built on the same systems used by many banks and fintech firms), efficient, and frictionless way to contribute, enhancing their overall experience.

Therese explained: “We’re still in the process of fully implementing open banking, but once we offer it to our supporters, we expect it to revolutionise our fundraising. The goal is to be present in as many relevant digital spaces as possible, ensuring we maximise efficiency and donor satisfaction.

CAFOD wants a seamless and secure process that will offer donors peace of mind that their contributions are handled efficiently and with minimal dilution of fees. Faster transaction times and reduced administrative overheads further contribute to operational efficiency, allowing CAFOD to allocate more resources directly to its programmes.

Challenges and considerations

While the potential benefits are clear, Therese and her team are mindful of several challenges, primarily donor education.

“Ensuring donors understand and trust the new payment method is crucial,” she said. “We plan to address this by providing clear information and support to donors, helping them transition smoothly to the new system. And internally, gaining acceptance and understanding from various stakeholders is also important.”

The digital fundraising team is working with colleagues to highlight the benefits and processes involved in open banking to ensure a unified approach. It represents a significant step in modernising its wider fundraising efforts and demonstrates how embracing new technologies can drive efficiency and enhance donor relations.

CAFOD is focused on being present in as many relevant digital spaces as possible, ensuring they meet supporters “where they are”. The team has found one of its biggest challenges is to put in place processes that suit requirements of its audience.

“With the closure of some local banking facilities, parish groups have fed back they can no longer go into a branch to make payments. They’re making bank transfers instead. It’s why the continued growth of digital fundraising is a priority, with open banking playing a crucial role in this evolution,” said Therese.

CAFOD’s adoption of open banking marks a significant step toward a more efficient and donor-friendly digital fundraising future. It’s a move that aligns with broader trends across the charity sector.

According to Charity Digital’s 2023 Digital Fundraising Report, over 60% of charities have embraced digital payment solutions as part of their fundraising strategy. Furthermore, the Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving Report revealed that 73% of donors prefer to use digital methods to contribute to causes they support.

As the growth of digital payments continues, CAFOD is demonstrating that embracing innovations such are open banking is key to meeting donor expectations and ensuring long-term sustainability.

*This varies from provider-to-provider

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.

Payments-as-a-service company, Ordo, recently partnered with digital transformation company, Eviden to offer an alternative way for organisations, including utilities providers, to collect customer payments.

The FlexiPay solution combines Ordo’s variable recurring payments (VRPs) and account information services with Eviden’s artificial intelligence (AI) notifications platform to provide a flexible alternative to Direct Debit and card-on-file instructions for bill payments.

It enables flexibility on the amount and frequency of payments to cover a bill, suiting a customer’s finances, rather than a set amount on a regular fixed date.

Spotting vulnerable customers and those in hardship

FlexiPay allows a business or organisation, such as a utilities company, to identify vulnerable customers and provide flexibility on when and how they pay their bills. Instead of relying on a single payment, on a specified date, for example a Direct Debit, flexible payments make it easier for customers to pay their bills. 

The system monitors customers’ finances via a consented process and can make recommendations for one or multiple payments. Each month, FlexiPay will suggest realistic amounts to pay to help the customer make their required payments.

Fliss Berridge, Ordo Director, said: “One of the key advantages of FlexiPay is that it can help customers to keep their bill payments on track, and even prompt them to change their payment habits. Eviden’s AI-driven recommendations platform encourages customers to make the effort to pay, in part or in full. It can also spot those who are financially vulnerable, those who are in hardship and even who may be about to enter hardship. It triages and recommends practical next steps, followed up by the appropriate team.”

Multiple payments when in funds

She added: “It can also help avoid arrears by allowing multiple payments when customers have funds to do so. Generally, customers who are offered payment flexibility will try to pay something towards their bill, rather than nothing, and offering the option to pay a bill in instalments helps to avoid arrears.”

Lower cost-per-transaction

For energy firms, open banking-powered solutions such as these typically offer a lower cost-per-transaction to process than cards – automatic reconciliation to accounts (reducing administration costs), lower costs when compared with chasing failed Direct Debits, and a smoother customer experience.

James Sharpe, Sales Director Digital Native Business, Eviden, said: “FlexiPay plays its part in the payments mix for utilities firms, and offers a credible alternative to Direct Debit and Standard Credit, especially for customers who are nervous of potentially large hikes via monthly Direct Debits.”

He added: “Direct Debit is considered a convenient payment solution for utilities. However, it can be troublesome for those consumers who find it difficult to make a single payment from a single account once a month, or even simply don’t trust Direct Debit. Standard credit or pre-payment meters often attract significant costs to transact, along with costs to reconcile.”

Different income profiles

James continued: “FlexiPay is a consumer-friendly, intelligent recommendation engine that understands the diverse needs of consumers. For example, individuals working in the gig economy are often paid weekly or fortnightly and those on zero hours contracts often have different income and outgoing profiles each month, so single payments can be a challenge.”

Solutions such as FlexiPay, which understand a customer’s specific financial situation and makes payment recommendations accordingly – whether smaller or larger, more frequent, or from multiple funding sources – put customers back in control of their bill payments. They also support firms’ ability to bill and collect efficiently. This is a win-win for firms and consumers.

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.

Wonderful logo

In 2016, Wonderful Payments launched as a fee-free fundraising platform for the collection of charity donations. However, although the platform’s reputation gained traction, more income simply meant more expense, and the cost of card processing constrained its impact and reach.  

To overcome this, the Wonderful leadership implemented open banking account-to-account (A2A) payments. This allows charities to offer open banking as a way to receive payments directly, without any ‘middle-man’, eliminating the card processing costs that had inhibited the platform’s growth.  

The platform has processed around £8 million in donations to date at no cost to charities, donors or fundraisers. Wonderful moved exclusively to open banking for donations in 2021, and interestingly, has already passed more money to charities via open banking transactions than it did via debit and credit cards in the preceding period. 

Wonderful CEO Kieron James is adamant that this approach to the third sector will remain central to the brand’s ethos. “The non-negotiable for us is that Wonderful will always be free for a charity. That will always be the case, and we live and die by it.” 

Open banking also appeals to donors because it can help reduce friction on payments and minimise security risks caused by manual errors. Donor and fundraisers are also confident that the total amount of cash given will go, in its entirety, to their chosen cause. 

Supporting small businesses 

The success of Wonderful’s A2A payments implementation prompted the organisation to consider other commercial opportunities that open banking could unlock. If open banking could reduce – or even potentially eliminate – card processing fees for charitable donations, could it be applied to corporate payments? 

Against the backdrop of the rise in the cost-of-living, Wonderful set out to bring the benefits of open banking to the small-to-medium-sized enterprise (SME) market with cost-effective payment processing and near-instant settlements.  

Wonderful worked on a series of integrations, from ecommerce platform WooCommerce to accounting software provider Xero, and went to market with a proposition for UK SMEs that, at the time of writing, allows them to process 2,000 monthly transactions for £19.99 per month, with each transaction outside the bundle charged at 1p.  

“We’ve made integration seamless with platforms such as WooCommerce and Xero (which also integrates with our own smartphone POS app), and we’re expanding to other third party platforms over the coming months. This will make it easier for SMEs to adopt our solution and thrive.”  

OBL support   

“The team at Open Banking Limited (OBL) have been fantastic with us,” Kieron remarked, “I can’t praise them highly enough. We held a launch day for WooCommerce developers, and an open banking spokesperson delivered a keynote speech explaining how payment processing fees can consume as much as 10% of annual net profit for one merchant. Our own research indicates this is closer to 18% for a typical UK SME. It helped to get the message out there that there is another way.”

“While open banking is great for the charitable sector, it’s also great for boosting SMEs’ margins. As word of its potential spreads, our ambition is to become the largest provider of open banking services in terms of registered customers.” 

Though still sustained through founder funding, Kieron is optimistic about Wonderful’s long-term potential. “People who know Wonderful love Wonderful, but we’ve never really had a marketing budget. Our growth has always been organic. Logically, we’ve gone about things in the opposite direction and worked hard to make payments as straightforward and slick as possible. 

“However, once people use open banking through our platform for the first time and see that it can be trusted, the marketing should all but take care of itself.”  

Building trust in the customer journey 

As with any new technology – especially one that deals with finances – the first interaction with a customer must cultivate trust. Kieron and the Wonderful team are working hard to get this right.  

“It’s a balance between introducing enough friction to the onboarding journey that a customer can trust our proposition but not so much that it becomes onerous. We’re doing everything we can to get that balance right.” 

He concluded: “Once the balance is there, the many benefits we can offer SMEs through open banking will be wrapped in that all-important layer of trust. At that point, there will be few limits to Wonderful’s potential.” 

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.

The Open Property Data Association (OPDA) is an independent industry body which aims to “promote the application of open property data for the benefit of all”.

Established in 2023 by Chair Maria Harris, the association recognised that the UK’s property data is held across several different organisations, ranging from government departments to local authorities, from private organisations to financial institutions. Less than one per cent of this data is digitised and there is no common format, standardised API, or trust framework to enable it to be effectively shared. 

The absence of a common standard is one of the main causes of delays in the homebuying chain, with each party (estate agents, mortgage lenders and brokers, surveyors, and solicitors) having to source and verify their own data for their part in the process.

These delays are stressful for buyers and sellers, undermine confidence in the home-buying process, incur unnecessary administration costs, and can sometimes cause the entire chain to collapse.

‘Smart Data Big Bang’

Home-buying is one of the seven economic sectors identified in the previous government’s ‘Smart Data Big Bang’ as being able to benefit from the increased data sharing and standardisation similar to that delivered by open banking, all of which will deliver wider economic benefits and cost-savings to consumers, SMEs and the public sector.   

Framework for property data

In February 2024, OPDA launched the latest version of its framework for property data standards.  The framework aims to speed up the digitisation of the property market, helping to make transactions easier and more efficient for both homebuyers and property professionals. 

Converting all property data sources and documents to a standardised digital format and making them shareable through open data standards will support this much-needed transition to digital property transactions.

The toolkit includes a common data dictionary, a standardised way to describe property attributes, and a methodology for sharing data with trust and provenance attached. It is available to the property industry and its software providers free of charge, without any proprietary licences.

National Trading Standards material information

Developed in collaboration with key industry organisations such as the Home Buying and Selling Group, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, and Moverly, which offers an automated system for managing property data, the latest version of the toolkit complies with the National Trading Standards (NTS) material information on property listings. Published last year, the guidance aims to help buyers, agents and conveyancers make informed decisions on property purchases by offering verified, transparent and accurate information.

Currently, the data needed by agents to comply with these rules is accessed from numerous data sources, including sellers, and can be hard to both aggregate and verify.

The organisation now counts Lloyds, HSBC UK, and Nationwide among its members.

As well as accelerating the digitisation of the home-buying journey, from start to finish, the OPDA framework will also support further innovation in the property and PropTech sectors.

Both OPDA and Moverly were shortlisted in the Department of Business and Trade’s Smart Data Discovery Challenge, which invited organisations from different sectors to submit their ideas for smart data use cases that could benefit consumers, small businesses and wider society.

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.

Fintech firm Fintellity has an interesting proposition. Working primarily with ‘merchants who are deemed ‘high risk’, in particular gambling operators, the firm’s custom-built platform uses opening banking technology to speed up the onboarding process to meet Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Safer Gambling regulations. But it also has an important second proposition, which is to offer support for problem gambling.

CEO and founder Shardai Cosgrove set the company up in 2020, following a 12-year career in alternative payments working on virtual pre-paid cards and wallets, primarily for merchants in the gaming and gambling sectors. Her focus was on building a seamless customer experience while supporting compliant on-boarding.

The emergence of open banking technology, and the continued growth in popularity of online gambling, highlighted an opportunity to become a one-stop shop for gambling operators.

Firms in this sector are required to ensure that gambling is ‘fair, safe and free of crime’. This includes conducting rigorous checks for source of funds (verifying the origin of funds used for a transaction, often bank statements) to prevent money laundering, and affordability to help prevent problem gambling. 

Fintellity’s mission was informed by Shardai seeing first-hand the devastating effects of both problem debt, and problem gambling, in her personal network. This tied together her previous commercial experience with a passion to support responsible gambling, creating a one-stop solution that brings lenders and gambling operators together.

She says: “Gambling operators have to check when a customer hits a certain threshold from an AML perspective, and open banking data is fantastic for that because one of the red flags is whether they use payday loans.

“But on the flipside, lenders can use also open banking data as well to check if this person is gambling. So, the two sides cross over and that’s where we come in, because if we offer that data to both parties, they are synchronised.”

How does it work?

Fintellity built its own API, which can be customised by clients to provide a seamless brand experience.

If a gambler wants to add funds to their account and hits a certain threshold, the gambling operator will need to do a check for source of funds or affordability. They will then reach the first screen of the dashboard, advised that there will be a check, and, if they consent, then go through the open banking journey, giving read-only access to their account data.

That data is fed into the operator behind the scenes, and depending on the size of the operator, examined by a compliance or risk manager, who will conduct the necessary checks. If the applicant passes the checks, the account will be ‘released’ and that person can continue gambling. Some of the larger operators have a risk engine, and feed in the data directly, validate the account against the rules, then either allow the customer continue or decline their funding.

The document-free check takes a matter of seconds.

If the person fails the checks, their account is ‘frozen’. They then receive an email from the compliance team and additional checks may be required before a second ‘go’ or ‘no-go’ decision is made and communicated to the customer.

Money management app

But this is just one aspect of the Fintellity proposition. The firm has also built its own money management app, separate to the API, which aims to help people manage their finances. It uses open banking data to analyse spending patterns, and offers practical to help their financial wellbeing. It will also signpost customers to relevant self-help such as budgeting support, and debt or gambling charities.

Clients can buy licences to add on to their Fintellity API, and the firm also licenses the app to charities or businesses that want to help their staff or clients calculate people’s disposable income so that they offer accurate advice. When developing the app, Fintellity conducted its own focus group with a gambling charity for people recovering from gambling addiction, to test it out.

Shardai explains, “Obviously one of the things that these people have is a mountain of debt, so we were interested in looking at spending patterns, then recommending budgets to help them get back up and running again.”

Feedback from the group also highlighted the fact that some of its members were unbanked, so Fintellity made sure the app included education for those people, along with practical information on how to rebuild their financial profiles.

This aspect of the firm’s proposition is well-timed. Last year, the government launched a review of gambling regulation to evaluate whether it meets the challenges facing the industry. The resulting White Paper sets out how to regulate the gambling industry in a digital age by presenting comprehensive new measures aimed at making gambling safer, while still enabling consumer freedom.

Fintellity’s multifaceted approach to these challenges offers some practical steps towards promoting safer gambling and protecting vulnerable customers, as well as providing operators with a smoother customer experience and robust customer checks.

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.

Little Birdie is a subscription and bill management app provider that allows consumers to save money on unused or unwanted subscriptions and recurring payments.

In the UK, estimates suggest that as much as £25 billion is wasted every year due to unused and unmonitored monthly payments. And more recently a Citizen’s Advice survey reported that two million people are struggling to cancel continuous payments for subscriptions, while in 2022 £0.5 billion was spent on subscriptions that auto-renewed without people realising.

As cost-of-living challenges continue to bite, the Little Birdie subscription and tracker app aims to make it easy for consumers to monitor and manage their subscriptions all in one place. It offers total visibility of outgoing subscription payments, as well as the ability to cancel and switch subscriptions within the app.

Staying on top of subscriptions and monthly bills
Little Birdie was launched in late 2022 and, according to founders Martin Bould and Jeremy Taylor, is the “wise bird on your shoulder whispering sage advice”.

The company estimates that the average household has between 10 and 20 subscriptions and regular payments, when utility bills, mobile phones, broadband, and other costs such as mortgages, are taken into account.

Research commissioned by the team in September 2022 found that 32% of respondents aged 18-to-34 expressed regret about subscriptions they had bought during the pandemic. Meanwhile, 41% were worried that regular subscription payments could push them into debt.

“The more we spoke to people and the more research we conducted, we kept uncovering insight around the problems of staying on top of subscriptions and recurring payments,” said Martin.

“There would be instances where people would see price increases coming through retrospectively on their bills and they wouldn’t understand why. And with the cost of living pushing households to the edge, we could see there was a space for a simple solution that gave people more control over their finances. That was the concept behind our app.”

Clear visibility
Little Birdie was built to directly address five problems that customers told Jeremy and Martin they were facing.

First was the ability to see all subscriptions in one place. Secondly, to help manage those subscriptions and allow users to set up notifications such as free trial and data alerts, price rise alerts, or contract end and renewal alerts.

The next step was to enable them to find better deals, developing price comparison functionality, and allowing customers to either switch or cancel, both of which are supported by the app’s ‘Click to Cancel’ feature, available for almost 400 merchants.

The starting point for this five-stage approach was open banking, which offered a route for bringing in subscription data.

Connecting through open banking
Little Birdie offers its service via a partnership with data intelligence platform Bud. Bud provides AI-powered transaction and data intelligence capabilities to companies around the world. Its machine learning technology transforms transactional data into insights that help clients to understand their customers, and in turn to highlight where they spend, how they can save, and which financial services might be relevant for them.

Through FCA-authorised Bud, Little Birdie’s customers can connect their accounts to the app using open banking. Bud’s ‘Engage’ product then enriches their transactions, allowing them to identify and manage their recurring payments and subscriptions, including cancelling those they no longer use.

It connects the app directly and securely to their bank and allows Little Birdie to identify their regular payments. This allows them to manage their subscriptions in one place – viewing, switching and cancelling.

Enabling better decisions through actionable insight

Little Birdie currently has 17,000 subscribers, of which half are active. Of those engaged users, 4,500 people have connected at least one bank account or credit card to the service.

Working with Bud, Little Birdie is able to pull fully enriched transactional data into its app. Little Birdie then builds on this enriched data to further identify subscriptions and surface these to the user.

Martin said: “Payment information is pulled into Little Birdie via open banking and categorised by a combination of Bud’s platform and Little Birdie’s. We use the enriched data to provide a dashboard of spend analysis and insight-based recommendations to our customers.”

And the team believes most households could make significant savings. Little Birdie calculates that an average customer with a connected bank account could have at least 10 subscriptions and regular payments that could be optimised. This could lead to potential cost savings of £500 to £1,000.

Enabling innovation through open banking
Evolving from its roots in B2C personal financial management, Bud identified opportunities to work with existing providers, utilising AI and open banking to enhance their propositions.

Using AI and open banking from the outset, the company works with a range of UK and global financial institutions.

Thomas Purton, Senior Product Manager for Engage at Bud, is charged with building a suite of features that helps customers do more with open banking data once they’ve got it.

He explained: “It’s not just about the information that you can see – we want to see the really interesting insights, what we can do with this data and what kind of intelligence can we get off the back of it. How can it add value to these end-customers?

“Through our transactional intelligence, we’re able to ingest data from the banks and from there enrich it, add more context and pull out things like categorisation, subscription type, merchant and so on. What it then allows us to do, in a very nice and easy way, is provide analysis back to Little Birdie’s customers.”

By giving consumers greater visibility of recurring transactions such as subscriptions and Direct Debits, apps such as Little Birdie can enable them to tackle ‘set and forget’ subscription traps, make valuable cost savings, and help to improve their longer-term financial resilience.

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.

Salad Money is a social enterprise and community development finance institution (CDFI) that has helped to pioneer the use of open banking data to build a fairer, more inclusive credit market. The FCA-regulated lender started out by offering personal loans to NHS and public sector employees, but has recently extended its offering to anyone in employment. Many of its clients would otherwise be excluded from the traditional lending market.  

Established in 2018 by CEO Tim Rooney, Salad Money’s tagline is ‘More than your score’. This organisation primarily lends to those individuals who lack the strong credit scores that many lending institutions rely on to assess people’s ability to repay loans. Its 2022-2023 Impact Report highlights that about 6 million people in the UK are ‘credit-invisible’ and are often automatically rejected for a loan by many lenders because of this. 

As well as being denied access to finance, these individuals are often faced with no alternative but to use high-cost – and sometimes toxic borrowing – that can over-burden individuals with loans that they can’t afford to repay, and create a vicious circle of debt.  

Salad Money’s inclusive approach has succeeded. Since May 2019, the CDFI has lent £56 million to 44,000 customers, solely using open banking data, with very low loss rates.  

Its customers say the same. Salad Money recently celebrated its 5,000th TrustPilot review, and is proud to have an average score of 4.9 on the independent review channel.  

Who is the audience?  
Salad Money offers loans of between £500 and £1,000 to UK employees, repayable over a 12- or 18-month period. Borrowers need to demonstrate that they have a minimum of six months’ worth of past income of at least £1,400 per month from the same employer.  

How does it work? 
Borrowers applying to Salad Money allow the organisation to use open banking to access their bank data – the equivalent of uploading a bank statement. This enables the firm to assess all of an individual’s spending: money coming in, money going out, regular Direct Debits (including ‘non-reported items’ such as council tax which are ignored in traditional credit assessments), and any missed payments. This accurately demonstrates the difference between their fixed expenditure and their disposable income, and their ability to repay a loan. 

In the five years since it has been operating, the CDFI has built up thousands of data points about financial behaviour, painting an accurate picture of each potential borrower’s spending habits. This data has now been adopted by mainstream lenders, credit unions and other CDFIs to support their lending processes and decision-making.  

Rooney says: “We are able to consume that data very efficiently. Through our partnership with [open banking platform] Yapily, we have a categorisation process that we use, and we make good lending decisions. Regardless of whether you’ve got a CCJ, or you’ve missed a few payments, we’re looking for the good and we find the good.” 

He adds that, in some circumstances, Salad Money believes CCJs can be a positive: “For example, an applicant with a five-year-old CCJ which has been settled may be rejected by some lenders. But for us, that satisfied CCJ, or in fact a CCJ of two to six years old, often paints a useful part of the picture of financial reliability and responsibility. 

“We even produce packs for some banks on their customers: what their borrowing is, who they’re borrowing from, and the annual percentage rates [they are charged by] the organisations that they’re borrowing from.” 

The loan assessment itself is supported by human decision-making from Salad Money’s customer service team, and applicants often receive a response within minutes. Once a loan is agreed, funds can appear in borrowers’ accounts within hours of being authorised. 

One client, an NHS staff nurse, recounted her experience after conducting an online search for lenders which work with people who have a limited credit history: “I found Salad and it seemed to make sense – if they could look at my income and outgoings through open banking, they should be able to see I could afford to borrow what I needed. It was a pretty easy process and the very next day I was told I’d been approved.” 

Her £1,000 Salad loan helped her pay for her wedding. She adds that the repayments were “easy to manage, and I realised I could actually pay it off earlier than I had originally thought, so I have done, which saved me a bit of money too”. 

Salad Money also offers follow-up lending if needed, with clients going through another open banking affordability check after, say nine repayments, and applying for another loan. Loans are repaid via their employer’s payroll or by Direct Debit. 

It also uses open banking data to remind customers that their loan repayments are due. Rooney says: “If we can help a customer before they hit a brick wall, then open banking is a very useful way of doing that.” 

Benefits checker 
Another key tenet of Salad Money’s approach to fair lending is the inclusion of the InBest benefits checker as part of its application process. The checker compares the benefits that people receive with any benefits they are entitled to, based on their specific financial situation, enabling applicants to see if they are eligible for any, or further, benefits, and signpost them to the Government Gateway to apply. 

One customer found his household was entitled to an extra £200 per month that he didn’t know existed when he applied for a £1,000 loan, and in some cases, the additional benefits can eliminate the need for a loan altogether. 

Rooney explains: “One thing that we’ve been incredibly successful at, which, again, wouldn’t have been possible without open banking, is helping people claim additional benefits. This year we’ve identified around £36 million worth of additional benefits which people are entitled to each month (an average of £4,176 per year). In a lot of cases, for a declined customer, this is the difference between them needing to borrow or not.”  

Conclusion 
With the gap in the availability of affordable credit expected to reach £3bn by 2025, and many UK households continuing to face cost of living increases, it’s clear that socially inclusive lenders such as Salad Money – through open banking – have an increasing role to play in unlocking affordable lending and supporting financial inclusion.

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.

Cost-of-living challenges faced by many UK households have highlighted the continued need for affordable finance – particularly for individuals who may not have a strong credit history. Plend is one of the new breed of alternative lenders that use open banking transaction data in their risk decision-making model when they assess loan applications. This enables a broader audience to access credit, at more competitive rates, which they may have been denied using traditional loan criteria.

The FCA-regulated lender was founded in 2020 by Robert Pasco and James Pursail, following Rob’s own challenging experience in trying to secure credit in the UK. As a New Zealander, who had immigrated to work in finance, he found his lack of credit history a major obstacle in finding a loan, leading him to rely on high-interest credit cards to fund himself, resulting in unsustainable high-cost debt.

Inclusive borrowing

Plend’s goal is to use open banking data to offer affordable lending to people who have invisible or inaccurate credit histories – young, new to the country, and more financially vulnerable consumers – offering them a fair decision, affordable repayment rates, and a more compassionate way to borrow. 

Rob points out that many traditional loan assessments are still based in part on outdated criteria such as postcode or regional data. If applicants have a thin credit file, the use of such data can significantly skew the outcome of loan applications. He adds that there is no correlation between where people live and their likelihood to repay. 

According to research from PWC, up to 20 million UK adults are held back by inaccurate credit data, while Plend’s own 2023 Financial Inclusion report revealed that 33% of people have found it more difficult to access loans or credit cards since the start of the cost of living crisis, while 28% of people feel locked out of the financial system altogether. 

Plend’s alternative approach to borrowing has enabled it to lend £7.3m over the past 12 months – saving an average of £600+ per customer. Many of these individuals could have otherwise been denied funding, or turned to costly overdrafts, illegal money lending, or credit cards. 

Plend uses payments provider GoCardless’s portal to collect customer payments. Once approved for a loan, they’re directed to a Plend-branded GoCardless portal to set up a Direct Debit bank payment mandate. In addition, Plend will soon use GoCardless for variable recurring payments (VRPs), powered by open banking, to give customers another repayment option. The flexible and immediate nature of VRPs will enable customers to easily change their payment schedule to suit their financial situation.

How customers view open banking

This summer, Plend contacted its very first five customers to ask them about their experience of using open banking data as part of the loan assessment and the difference it made to their finances. We share their views below.

Accurate decision-making 

“What stood out to me was Plend’s unique approach which takes into account your banking information to determine how much you can afford to pay each month. I don’t feel credit scores show a true reflection of a person’s financial ability – open banking is a more personal way of seeing how someone can deal with their finances.”

Customer 1

Consolidating debt

“I wanted to take out a loan so that I could consolidate my debts into manageable monthly payments. Plend’s open banking system, compared to the credit score system, gave me a fair chance to be accepted. It made me feel more confident that I was being evaluated fairly. Being able to have that lifeline has helped a tremendous amount, allowing me some breathing space from overwhelming debts. It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders!” Customer 2

Assessing ability to repay

“Plend looks beyond that ‘one size fits all’ thinking of your credit score and your postcode. I was given a much fairer interest rate for my personal circumstances. Other lenders just look at credit scores, whereas Plend looks at your banking data too, which allows them to see your incomings and outgoings. The open banking approach definitely made me feel more confident that my application was being reviewed fairly. It only takes minutes to set up, and it’s not a long drawn out process.

Before Plend my only options were higher interest rates, being in a vicious circle and never getting out of debt.” Customer 3

Less paperwork and faster decisions

“Open banking saves you from filling out lots of forms about your spending and you just let people look at your bank account to see the real numbers. Sometimes the forms are inaccurate, and you can’t remember spending information. I think open banking is the way to go, I know credit scores will always be here, but with open banking, it gives access to your recent banking data in order to understand exactly what you can afford to pay each month. It’s a great way to demonstrate if you can actually afford the loan. If you’re looking to consolidate debt, then it’s easy to see which amounts you’ll be able to pay off.”

“[Having to connect my bank account] didn’t make me feel nervous at all – after all, it’s my bank account and I have nothing to hide. I suppose there are always security issues but because Plend explained they were regulated by the FCA I felt it was safe.” 

Customer 4

Community finance

As well as lending directly to personal customers, Plend works with several community development finance institutions (CDFIs). These include social enterprise Lendology, which offers lending to local authority homeowners; Purple Shoots, which offers microfinance for small businesses and social enterprises; and Robert Owen Community Banking, a not-for-profit organisation that provides loans for businesses, homes and community initiatives in Wales.

By providing its open banking technology to these CDFIs, they can extend loans to a broader range of individuals, many of whom would be locked out of affordable credit.

Conclusion

Utilising open banking data in the loan approval process is helping to tackle financial exclusion and offer fairer, more socially responsible borrowing to a range of under-served audiences across the UK. It’s also proving to be an effective way to prevent fraud and to flag up customers in pre-arrears, helping to stop them from falling behind with their debt repayments. 

Rob concludes: “Open banking isn’t just about expanding access to credit, it also provides a powerful tool in fortifying your financial security. Plend leverages open banking to provide our users with fraud prevention and anti-money laundering protocols. Our customer’s safety and trust are our top priorities, and with open banking, we ensure a level of protection that sets us apart.”

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.

Law firms, accountants, and fund managers are some of the most process-driven and paperwork-heavy organisations in operation. Many of their core tasks are complex and require significant manual intervention and rigorous checking to ensure they meet the accuracy necessary to complete their day-to-day work.

Circit is an audit evidence platform that leverages open banking technology to help streamline the audit process, enabling auditors to independently and securely verify assets at source from banks in near real-time. It delivers the robust audit evidence required by regulators and can help to reduce the risk of fraud.

Founded in 2017 by a team of former auditors, the FCA-authorised firm is headquartered in Dublin and is regulated as an account information services provider (AISP).

Jason O’Shaughnessy, VP Sales & Partnerships at Circit, said: “Banks have teams of up to 20 people which manage and respond to audit requests, and these requests can take 20-30 days to resolve – particularly at peak times such as the beginning and end of the year.

“Using open banking connections to manage and deliver these requests via a single dashboard can reduce this time to as little as two days and cuts out 50% of effort. It also improves the quality and accuracy of audits.” 

How does it work?

It only takes a few days to set up the Circit dashboard, and the firm aims to make it a seamless process for their clients.

Instead of supplying account information via CSV files and PDFs, clients give authorisation to use open banking connections, via a secure SaaS environment, to give auditors direct access to their transactional data for the accounts that need to be audited. This makes it easier to match and verify data, as well as quickly identify any anomalies or missing information.

The platform automates the following core audit tasks (clients can choose the functionality they need, and add new features to their dashboard at a later stage):

Auditors can contact clients directly via the Circit dashboard to highlight and resolve any queries in near real-time, rather than rely on email or post. This avoids cross-over communications and negates the need for follow-up meetings.

The financial director of the audited firm receives a request in the dashboard, then provides the necessary information; the auditor receives this on the Circit platform and confirms the data to complete the workflow.

Mark Attwood, Corporate Partner at accountancy firm Kreston Reeves, commented: “We recognise that the open banking transactions that can be obtained via Circit are really important to an audit process as this control account is a fundamental cornerstone of any accounting system. Standardising the data retrieval is vital to any enhancement in audit as it cuts down on the variables.”

It is clear that the platform has delivered cost and time efficiencies for both Circit’s own clients and their end clients, particularly for smaller firms which don’t always have standardised document management. Streamlining these key aspects of the audit process can help improve the accuracy of audit trails, and reduce the amount of time it takes to resolve queries, in turn, improving client collaboration and saving on valuable billing hours.

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 marketing@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.

HEY Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial co-operative which aims to provide fair and responsible savings and loans for the people of Hull, East Yorkshire, Northern Lincolnshire, and the YO postcode area. Operating for a quarter of a century, it services more than 16,000 adult members, around 1,350 junior savers, and administers £14.2 million in savings.

A traditional enterprise in many respects, HEY Credit Union’s relationship with open banking provider AperiData has brought it to the forefront of digital lending.

AperiData is an FCA-regulated credit reference agency, and an account information service provider (AISP) that operates as an open banking provider. Its software maximises the potential of open banking and other data sources, enabling lenders to make smarter decisions for consumers and small business customers.

Its leadership team has used their decades of experience in credit risk to develop the firm’s Credit Console, a front-end system designed to help lenders (primarily serving small businesses and consumers) and their underwriters make faster, more informed decisions. Supporting credit unions is a growing priority for the firm.

Andrew Bonsall, AperiData Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, explained: “As a regulated credit reference agency and open banking provider, we use open banking data to provide our clients with greater consumer insight so they can make better, more informed lending decisions.”

How AperiData works

Essentially, AperiData takes open banking data and uses it to build profiles and data insights from which lenders can create detailed financial assessments of individuals, down to individual transactions. Crucially, it does this in near real-time, unlike the monthly snapshots provided by traditional credit bureaus.

AperiData also has all credit reference agency permissions so that its clients have the reassurance of regulatory compliance.

In terms of deployment, the AperiData Credit Console is accessed through a browser like any other website, or by using APIs which can be integrated directly into an application provider’s platform.

Clear view of customer finances

AperiData aims to modernise the consumer credit scoring market by blending near real-time financial data with traditional banking data to create highly specific customer insights for its clients. In turn, this allows lenders to offer more tailored products to customers who could otherwise find themselves excluded from mainstream lending and resorting to costly credit cards, overdrafts, payday lenders, or even unregulated lenders.

The platform categorises all transactions and can identify potential high-risk spending patterns such as gambling, and potential signs of financial vulnerability such as missed payments or excessive borrowing. This gives lenders a consistent view of where customers spend their money and additional insight, such as income and expenditure trends. Moreover, it saves customers and underwriters from ploughing through old bank statements to retrieve that information themselves.

AperiData also helps lenders eliminate the need for storing and managing vast quantities of PDFs and paper-based financial documentation.

Apart from the significant time savings, larger loans can be approved with greater confidence, removing stress for the customer, and expanding borrowing opportunities for under-served customers.

Despite its proud heritage serving the people of its home region with responsible loans, HEY Credit Union had remained a largely paper-reliant lender. Though plans were being formulated for a digital overhaul, COVID lockdowns meant those plans had to be actioned quickly.

Unable to see their customers in person, and with customers often unable to upload electronic bank statements, HEY Credit Union needed an alternative.

Using AperiData’s open banking-powered technology, with their customers’ consent, HEY Credit Union was able to access customer banking information going back further than the 30 days covered in a standard bank statement.

Matthew Stevens, HEY Credit Union Chief Executive Officer, said: “If we’ve got 90 days’ worth of bank data, we can see all the money coming in, including other loans that might raise a question for us. This allows us to have a proper conversation with a member where we’ll often discover that there’s a perfectly logical explanation for any anomalies. There’s no question that open banking gives us a much better picture of a customer’s affordability.”

Increased loan approvals

Armed with a more holistic view of a customer’s finances, including details of long-standing Direct Debits and overdraft limits, HEY Credit Union could make more accurate affordability assessments. Not only did this make loan approvals safer for itself and its customers, it enabled the credit union to approve many more loans.

In marginal cases, where traditional credit bureau data does not provide a credit union with sufficient information to make a decision, HEY Credit Union says around 90% are now getting approved because of the accuracy and comprehensiveness of open banking data, particularly for larger amounts.

For HEY Credit Union’s larger loans (those exceeding £1,000), the Yorkshire-based co-operative has found open banking invaluable. While a customer can have an exemplary credit report on paper, incomplete or inconsistent reports from traditional credit reference agencies can muddy the process, meaning lenders often miss vital information. HEY Credit Union has found that open banking can plug this gap, adding greater certainty when approving loans that run into four figures or more.

The organisation is also able to process loans faster. In the pre-open banking days, its customers might have had to wait a number of days to have a loan approved.

Today, for its existing members, the whole process is often completed on the same day the loan was requested, meaning customers get faster access to much-needed funds.

It also delivers cost savings for the credit unions themselves.

Phil Dilley, AperiData Co-Founder, said: “Open banking is streamlining a lot of credit unions’ manual processes, whether it’s Know Your Customer, income verification, lending, back-office operations, or forbearance. It can often take up to two weeks for a credit union customer to get their information together and submitted for manual review. Using open banking, we can reduce that to 24 hours. Such time-saving has a significant monetary value.”

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 marketing@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.

Open banking payments solution fumopay was established by CEO Kevin Ludford in 2019 with the aim of helping consumers and businesses improve their financial wellbeing – whether that’s enabling businesses get paid faster or supporting consumers to manage their social finances.

Kevin said: “I started following the open banking initiative in 2018 and it became very clear that it was going to transform the institutionalised banking sector, enabling fintech firms like fumopay to bring innovation directly to consumers and small businesses.”   

fumopay, which is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, is an API-based payment platform designed to deliver a single ‘mobile first’ payment experience across all channels. For business users, it offers merchants and ecommerce retailers a frictionless and cost-effective alternative to card payments (and the associated fees), either by integrating it into their checkout process or by offering QR codes as a payment option in-store.

It also enables businesses to be paid more quickly by using open banking-enabled payments via a Pay by Bank link or simply using their business app, as an alternative to mobile card readers.

Integration with accountancy packages

The platform can be integrated with accountancy software such as Xero, and QuickBooks allowing firms to have their invoices paid directly via their customer’s bank account, or to share a payment link with a client and receive account-to-account payments in near real-time, helping to improve cash flow.

It is available via the Xero app store, enabling Xero users to add Pay by Bank directly to any Xero-generated invoice, allowing payers to quickly settle payment without the need to set up a payee with fumopay first. As well as streamlining the payment process, fumopay also makes it easier for firms to manage and reconcile payments as 100% of the invoice value is credited directly to the merchant.

Cheshire-based digital marketing agency, Childsey, has been using fumopay since 2020, after managing director Simon Childsey met Kevin at a business event.

As a qualified accountant, Simon immediately understood the value of offering clients an additional way to pay, that also helped him get paid faster, and which offered his business cost and time savings by not having to reconcile accounts.

The company, which acts as a ‘marketing department within a box’ to clients across a range of industries, works on a retainer basis.

Simon commented: “The value of our invoices is quite large. We’re a bespoke service, so a credit card payment doesn’t really work. And I don’t want it sitting in a payment processing platform for a few weeks before I’m able to get my hands on it, then have to tally it all up.”

It also makes it easier for clients to make a payment, and minimises the risks of an invoice getting lost.

“Open banking seemed like a good fit. It’s easier to ask someone to hit a nice, big ‘Pay now’ button than to type in all their bank details and just go through a quick process to pay.” He also appreciates the accuracy of using a ‘Pay By Bank’ link.

He said: “From my side it seems incredibly secure. I’m concerned that, one day, someone will pay me an invoice and may put a digit in incorrectly. It seems almost impossible to make a mistake throughout this process.”

Simple to set up and connect with Xero

Simon explains that it was easy to get started with fumopay – it took a matter of minutes to connect the platform to his Xero accounts, which was a valuable benefit to him as business owner.

He continues: “My expertise is in marketing. The more time I can spend doing that, and supporting my clients, the better. I charge my time out, and my team’s time out on a day rate, so the less time I spend chasing invoices, getting invoices paid, and worrying about finances, the better.

“It can also give your clients flexibility, helps you get your cash flow in a good place, and gets payments through the door quicker. And you have the reliability of a good payment method.

“If I can eliminate some of the worry about getting paid that’s only going to benefit me. It’s about mitigating risk on the financial side of things, and hopefully speeding up the [payment process]. That’s why I’m using it and that’s probably why some other business owners should too!”

fumopay’s Kevin summarised the benefits of the platform as follows: ‘Speed, security and cost. These are the three key benefits that resonate with every merchant we work with.

“Speed makes it easy for customers to pay and provides immediate receipt of funds. Security: people know that a payment can normally only be initiated by the payer authenticating the payment via their own bank’s security protocols. Cost: it can be expensive to get paid, open banking eliminates many of the associated legacy fees, so our customers benefit from those savings.”

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 marketing@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.

fumopay Ltd is authorised and regulated in the United Kingdom by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Cazoo and TrueLayer logos

Since 2021, an unlikely coalition of economic factors has turned the UK’s second-hand car market on its head: in previous years, it was usually the case that the value of a new car started to depreciate as soon as it was driven away from the dealership.

However, the pandemic put paid to that. Lockdown, a fear of public transport, and a series of supply chain failures all combined to create a pent-up demand for second-hand cars, sending their value spiralling upwards.

In the first quarter of 2022, around 1.8 million second-hand cars changed hands, while average used car values in April 2022 were 32.2% higher than a year ago.

At the same time, the way in which people buy used cars also changed, following the broader trend to online sales. This has been facilitated by new services such as online car retailer Cazoo.

Launched in 2018, Cazoo set out to transform the UK’s car buying and selling experience by making buying or selling a car no different to ordering any other product online. The aim is to enable people to seamlessly buy, sell or finance a car entirely online for delivery or collection in as little as 72 hours.      

Challenge to handle high-value purchases

Because of the high-value nature of most transactions, car sales have been a sticking point for dealers and buyers alike. Carrying large amounts of cash presents a risk, credit cards may have limits that are too low for the purchase, and cheques may not clear in sufficient time.

Boaz Valkin, Head of Product at Cazoo, explains: “When people purchase cars, it’s likely the second largest purchase of their lives, after a house – our customers typically pay by credit card or through a loan provider. We wanted a third option that provided minimal friction and where funds settle quickly.”

Sitong Wei, Payments Product Manager at Cazoo, adds: “One huge pain point for us and our customers was card transaction limits, as a car retail purchase obviously means a high average order value. Open banking payments offered a solution to this.”

“One huge pain point for us and our customers was card transaction limits, as a car retail purchase obviously means a high average order value. Open banking payments offered a solution to this.” Sitong Wei, Payments Product Manager, Cazoo

Cazoo partnered with payments provider TrueLayer to deliver its open banking solution, and integrated TrueLayer’s payments API into its online offering in May 2021. This offered customers another choice of how to pay for their car, adding open banking to the list of payment options.

Instead of having to wait one or two days for a payment to clear, the buyer sends the payment via open banking, and Cazoo receives it in almost-real-time.

Of course, all payment methods have pros and cons, so the individual consumer should carefully consider his or her own circumstances, but open banking offers a great new payment option for consumers.

Buying a car with open banking

Once the buyer has chosen their car from the Cazoo portal, and decided to make their purchase, they are taken to the payment journey.

  1. The customer reviews the details of their order (as with any online purchase), collection method etc, and chooses their payment method.
  2. They initiate the payment process via a consent screen and choose their bank.      
  3. They are then sent to their banking app to authenticate the payment.
  4. The customer is sent back to Cazoo to confirm the order and Cazoo request the payment.

In the UK, all Cazoo payments are sent via the Faster Payment rails, which means, in most cases, this takes a matter of minutes. Customers appreciate that there’s no premium for a speedy payment.

Other benefits from open banking

Cazoo also noted additional benefits from this payment method, including helping to tackle card-not-present fraud, having bank authentication baked into the payment experience, and a reduction in costs compared to card payments.

The company no longer has to match incoming funds with expected funds, handle mis-directed funds or mis-matched reference numbers.

The uptake has been strong, and Cazoo now estimates that one in four of its buyers use the open banking option to pay.

Selling a car

The car retailer also enables people to sell their car to Cazoo via its online platform. By integrating TrueLayer’s payments and data API into the customer journey, the seller can enable Cazoo to make a fast payout before handing over their car to the car retailer. The seller will normally complete two-factor authentication via their banking app and – in most cases – see the payment in their account before the car has left their driveway.

They don’t have to share or manually enter their bank details, and the near-instant speed of the payment has been a massive plus for Cazoo’s customers.

Customer education

As many of Cazoo’s buyers and sellers were unfamiliar with open banking, and account information sharing, the company needed to highlight the benefits of the method to its customer base.

Wei pointed out that the company needed to reassure customers that access to an account is limited to the specific purpose of funds being transferred into or out of their account, depending on whether they are buying or selling – and only happens with the customer’s explicit consent.

Occasionally, the payment process is slowed by fraud checks, bank downtime or the need to manually retry the payment, but most payments are received within seconds.

Integrating open banking solutions

For other online retailers considering integrating an open banking payment solution into their ecommerce proposition, Wei offers some useful insights. These include:

With a recent report from Automotive Management suggesting that open banking could become the dominant form of payment in car dealerships by 2030, it seems that the transformation of the UK’s car sales market is set to continue.

Notes to editors

The Open Banking Implementation Entity 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 marketing@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.

Open banking payments platform, BOPP, launched in 2021 with the aim of simplifying digital payments, and cutting transaction fees.

BOPP works with a range of organisations, including SMEs and sole traders (from scaffolders to solicitors), the education sector, charities, and community groups such as Parentkind offering bank-to-bank transfers with near instant settlement via open banking. This helps these organisations to save money on card processing, payment platforms and chargebacks. Customers simply send a payment request (Paylink) via SMS, WhatsApp, email or QR code.

Parentkind is a national charity and membership organisation which supports the largest network of PTAs across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, counting more than 12,500 member PTAs.

These member PTAs raise around £120m in revenue from school fundraising efforts every year and, as they’re not-for-profit organisations, every penny they make counts. Many of Parentkind’s PTAs were concerned about the decline in physical cash, and the high costs of card processing and platform fees associated with fundraising efforts, and wanted to:

They also hoped to extend the opportunities for fundraising in the wider community through the use of QR codes, as well as offer contactless payments during the pandemic.

In a classic case of good timing, BOPP connected with Parentkind and spoke with its Commercial Development Officer, Charli Janeway, to explore how a partnership could help address some of these challenges.

Charli and the Parentkind team immediately saw the benefits that open banking payments could offer its members and signed an initial three-year deal with BOPP to provide payment services, offering an exclusive discounted service to its members.

Secure direct payments plus QR codes

As many of the PTAs are time-poor, BOPP and Parentkind wanted to make sure the sign-up process was straightforward.

The PTA representative (usually the Treasurer) clicks the sign-up button on the Parentkind website, chooses their package, then is taken to a pre-filled form with their organisation’s data. Once they’ve completed this, BOPP sends a confirmation email with an activation code. All they need to do is download the BOPP app on their phone and activate that link.

Quick set-up time

Ian Gass, Chief Executive Officer at Agitate (the company behind BOPP), estimates that it can take as little as 20 minutes to set up an account and receive a payment.

Most PTAs opt for the Value Bundle, a pay-as-you-go service with transaction fees of 0.5%, with a 5p minimum fee and a maximum price cap of 50p per transaction.

As well as cost-effective payments, BOPP allows PTAs to display a QR code on a school notice board or add a secure Paylink to any text or social media post. When it’s scanned or clicked, it enables payment direct from the security of the donor’s bank account direct to the PTA’s account.

Paula Melville, Chair of Parents at Wheatfields School (PAWS), says: “We decided to give BOPP a try and it’s one of the best things we’ve done for our fundraising efforts.

“One of our first events using it was a dress-down day. We used the Paylink in our emails to families and on our social media, and we put printed QR codes at each drop-off point. The event brought in five times what it usually does with many parents saying how easy it was to pay either in advance using the Paylink or at the classroom door using the QR code on their phone.”

Using the QR codes makes it easy to track the success of marketing comms, for example, using different codes on two different posters to see which events and promotions performed best.

Dashboard for payment reconciliations

There’s a handy dashboard which allows the PTA to see all the payments it’s received, which means it’s easy to reconcile events, and see who paid how much and for what event.

BOPP also developed custom features for the PTAs, including a personalised marketing email, customised pay requests and thank you notes, plus a Friends of BOPP referral scheme, which can help PTAs raise additional funds.

The results

Ten months on from its launch, and the results speak for themselves. PTAS have collected several thousand payments, with some having collected several hundred BOPP payments this year alone, while one PTA has collected over £4000 via the platform.

PTAs receive an average of 20 BOPP payments each month, for an average transaction of £7.48.

Kathryn Shepherd, Treasurer of Friends of Stoughton Infants, says: “We love how the money literally just goes straight into our bank account which is really important now our bank has added transaction fees to cash deposits – we need to make sure we don’t lose any funds that should be going straight to our school. Other payment methods such as PayPal incur much higher fees per transaction. We went for the pay monthly fee which means we don’t get charged on individual transactions and which works out much cheaper.”

Parentkind’s Charli Janeway adds that while most of the PTAs pay their membership fees by Direct Debit, some still prefer to pay by cheque, which isn’t efficient or cost-effective. There is also a lower retention rate compared with those PTAS that pay by Direct Debit.

Later this year Parentkind plans to include BOPP on its own invoices as a payment option, making it easier to renew memberships. He says, “That way, we reduce our processing fees, provide an additional payment method, and hopefully increase retention rates.”

He concludes, “When we roll this out, we’ll have the additional benefit of seeing payments instantly through the BOPP dashboard, so this will benefit us as a charity and our members too.”

Notes to editors

The Open Banking Implementation Entity 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 marketing@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.

YesRef is a sports platform that aims to make finding and paying sports officials quick and simple by connecting a wide range of sports clubs, businesses, and referees.

The business was established in August 2019, by CEO, Olly Rodriguez-Ballinger, and COO, Ben Williamson, after Olly – a lifelong sports enthusiast and qualified sports official – experienced first-hand the difficulty in both finding games to officiate and being paid.

YesRef now has over 115 different organisations across England and Scotland using its platform across 13 different sports. These include governing bodies such as Basketball Scotland, Berks & Bucks FA, educational institutions such as the University of Greenwich, City University of London, and Nottingham Trent University, and competitions such as the Hellenic League as well as a range of grassroots and professional clubs and businesses.

Its clients vary from employees, amateurs, and professionals at these organisations, to volunteers planning their favourite sports in their spare time.

Olly explains the YesRef journey. “We discovered open banking when we came across challenges with building our product and needed to meet our objective to pay sports officials in real-time. We spent a lot of time researching the various banking rails and understanding how money is both processed and transacted and it was quickly apparent that the open banking solution proved the only viable option to achieve our objective.

“We carried out detailed market research and conducted interviews with open banking operators across the UK to find a payment platform to partner with.”

Real-time payments for sports officials

YesRef wanted to provide sports officials with real-time payments from the organisations they refereed for. These organisations were starting to go cashless and the pandemic hugely accelerated this trend.

Olly continues: “The challenge with replacing cash for sports organisations and officials is the individual on match day typically doesn’t have access to the organisational bank account, and the official has to share bank details and wait for payment. We needed to provide them with a solution that enables money to flow seamlessly to the official on matchday while keeping the organisation in control.”

To meet this challenge, YesRef utilised TrueLayer’s open banking platform to help it deliver a complete solution to sports organisations and officials, combined with a Wise emoney account.

Olly explains: “We had developed a process with existing payment rails we knew worked well with our customers from our proof of concept. The transition to YesRef payments took about four to six weeks to build, test and push into production. Once we went live, there were very few issues or bugs to fix. The product has been seamless.”

It’s a simple process:

  1. A sports official signs up to the platform, registers their bank details and availability to referee.
  2. Once a game is complete, the team or sporting organisation notifies YesRef, and pays the referee’s fees and expenses into YesRef’s emoney account.
  3. YesRef then disburses the payment into the official’s bank account in near real-time.

YesRef operates a simple pricing model. For sports officials, the platform is completely free to use. Sports organisations can choose to use a transaction-based model, i.e. pay-as-you-go, or make use of the subscription model, which is suitable for organisations which run and manage multiple games and events each month. There are no sign-up fees.

One of the team at London’s New City College says: “YesRef gives us the freedom to pay referees on the day of the game and keep track of all of the costs, all in one place.”

Customer education – a new way to pay

The biggest barrier YesRef had to overcome was educating customers about a new way to pay for a service. When the team were building and testing the platform, they didn’t enable any payment method which allowed card payments. Having a single payment option – just to YesRef – gave its customers clarity, as well as demonstrating the open banking alternative.

Olly points out that, after the first experience, customer feedback was that this is a straightforward payment method, keeping the payee in control and allowing YesRef to build up trust with its customers.

One client at Braishfield Bees Football Club says, “The YesRef solution means our club coaches don’t ever have to pay the referee fees themselves and claim back from the club.”

The combined experience – not just paying, but delivering near real-time payments to sports officials – has been well received. The simplicity of the product, the huge reduction in administration, only one payee (YesRef) and providing their sports officials with real-time payments has proved hugely successful.

Olly observes that without the open banking functionality, a service like this would not be possible, due to the constraints of the existing payment rails.

He concludes: “Any organisation looking to collect or process payments, before adopting or automatically considering the ‘usual’ options, should consider an open banking solution. The speed and cost to implement is likely to be very similar, yet transaction processing rates are likely to be more competitive than banks and card processing merchants. The reduction in fraudulent payments is also very attractive.”

Notes to editors

The Open Banking Implementation Entity 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 marketing@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.

Ecospend is a financial data and payments platform which won the tender to supply HMRC – one of the biggest open banking initiatives ever launched – in March 2021.

With the January 2022 self-assessment tax deadline just gone, David Beardmore, OBIE’s Ecosystem Director, caught up with James Hickman, Ecospend’s Chief Commercial Officer, to ask how tax season was going. We summarise the conversation below and you can watch the complete video here.

David Beardmore (DB): We’ve just passed the end of January, the deadline for self-assessments, and obviously it’s the busiest time of the year for paying tax bills. So I was keen to hear how things have progressed since we were chatting back in November at Open Banking Expo. How’s it been?

James Hickman (JH): January 2022 was our first real test, because this was the first self-assessment peak.

Both our systems and our technology delivered well, so hats off to our tech guys. I think we’ve now passed around £4 billion in payments. We also had one day in which we delivered over £200 million in payments.

We have introduced nearly one million first-time users to open banking in the past couple of months too.  

Executing a ‘pay by bank account’ process successfully, and this is successful, not just for us, but the whole ecosystem, because ultimately they are transactions that have migrated away from cards and have been executed by customers, using an open banking Application Programming Interface (API).

DB: Those numbers are staggering. It’s a real credit to the team at HMRC for being adventurous and taking it to this level.

But there’s some other real benefits to HMRC too. HMRC sees open banking as really useful in terms of how it receives payments from individuals and small businesses.

JH: Absolutely, you’re leveraging the fact that 80% of our population now have a smartphone and a banking app on their smartphone.

You’re effectively removing the need for a piece of plastic with a 16-digit card number and initiating a single API calling another single API, so it’s a very quick, aggregated journey.

This is not only quicker, and more secure – it removes the risk of chargeback fraud. This might be less interesting for the government, but it certainly saves on fees.

The other thing, of course, which is relevant to HMRC, is around reconciliation.

I know HMRC has issues with suspense accounts and payments coming through which are not easy to allocate because the reference or Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR) numbers aren’t input correctly. With an open banking journey there’s little room for error. There’s no manual entry required.

James Hickman, Chief Commercial Officer, Ecospend

And it’s fair to say that we have seen 100% reconciliation, in that all the payments we’ve helped to initiate have ended up in the right account. So it’s easy to imagine the benefits of that alone in terms of efficiency and cost savings around not having to repatriate money that then can’t be released to the public purse.

It’s also about giving customers more choice, giving them an option where they don’t have to share card details.

DB: One thing I wanted to pick up was the decoupled journey. Can you explain what that is and how you see it being used for paying tax bills?

JH: Absolutely. One of the things we realised, is that, obviously, an open banking payment journey works far better when initiated through a smartphone because you’re typically using your biometric ID.

That said, people like to complete their tax returns on a computer, not on a phone and so again, hats off to HMRC. They just use the ‘decoupled journey’.

This allows the customer to start or complete their tax return on their desktop, start the payment journey on their desktop, scan a QR code on the desktop then complete the payment journey, via their smartphone using their biometric ID.

It’s the perfect bridge between a desktop experience and a mobile-centric payment journey.

DB:  I want to finish with something that many of us saw in the press when a prominent banker suggested that open banking hasn’t been a success. I’m guessing that you might have a different view.

JH: I think the numbers talk for themselves. It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a very nascent technology.

Things always take many years before they reach that level of ubiquity.

As a recap, we’ve been in the market now for just over a year, our first project was to launch our program with HMRC. We’ve also got a number of private sector clients, large blue-chip organisations using our services, as I know many of our great competitors have as well, but for Ecospend it’s numbers. To recap – over £44 billion has been transacted.

A couple of million new people – both businesses and consumers – were introduced to this solution over the last 12 months.

These are records that keep tumbling, and I’m sure the growth will only increase. If I was a challenger bank, I would be more than happy with those figures less than 12 months from launch.

And it’s worth pointing out that we launched our HMRC program in the middle of a pandemic – we did the whole thing on Microsoft teams.

So we have also been operating in challenging conditions, so I would probably say to that prominent banker look at the numbers and let’s keep pushing it. This is just the start. We are still only scratching the surface.

And one final point to note is that the UK is significantly ahead of the rest of the world with this technology – a global leader – and it’s important that we try to maintain that position!

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

The UK’s energy sector is under unprecedented pressure – the increasing cost of wholesale gas and power (with further price cap increases expected in October 2022), a string of supplier bankruptcies, combined with post-pandemic debt challenges for many customers – have produced a perfect storm of challenges for energy companies and consumers alike.  

While there is no silver bullet to remedy this series of complex problems, it does provide further impetus for energy companies to explore – and expedite the development of – smarter solutions which lower the cost-to-serve. Hence the rise in open banking payment solutions (bank-to-bank transfer).

Cost savings and cheaper ways to pay

The opportunities are two-fold: offering domestic customers a new, real-time, secure and convenient way to pay, and significant direct and indirect cost savings for energy retailers. This includes a more cost-effective alternative to Direct Debits.

We spoke to Siemens, which has collaborated with payment solutions provider Ordo, and systems integrator CGI, to offer open banking technology as a payment option within its Managed Credit solution.

Siemens Managed Credit

“Managed Credit was developed as a way for energy suppliers to manage credit risk more effectively and offer a lower cost-to-serve, while providing end customers with a more intuitive customer experience,” comments Nick Jones, Head of Managed Credit, Siemens.

“In addition to traditional online and cash payment methods, it offers suppliers access to Ordo’s bank-to-bank transfer platform, removing costly commission charges.  This means suppliers can offer Managed Credit as a cost-effective payment option, which is cheaper than Direct Debit.”

Open banking allows businesses to securely request payments from their customers in real-time, via direct bank-to-bank transfer. This eliminates payment card and reconciliation fees on every transaction, generating significant savings.

Managed Credit also offers an alternative to typical credit and prepayment arrangements. It helps energy retailers tackle the problem of costly pre-paid meters, which are traditionally more expensive – and time-consuming – to run for both energy retailers and their customers.

Retailers benefit from commission-free transactions

For an energy supplier managing a significant volume of payment transactions each year, this removes the standard 1% commission fee typically associated with payment transactions This is a major saving when pre-payment energy customers alone carry out approximately £4 billion-worth of transactions each year.

It also gives retailers an opportunity to offer their domestic customers a more compelling alternative to traditional pay-as-you-go (PAYG), Direct Debit and pay-on-bill arrangements, particularly for digitally-connected consumers.

Managed Credit works by running smart meters in credit mode (but managed as if they were operating in prepay mode) while maintaining a central payment wallet via a smartphone or website.

Benefits for consumers

The wallet lets customers manage their gas and electricity in a single energy account and by topping up a single wallet, they make up to 50% fewer top-ups than with individual smart gas and electricity meters operating in pre-pay mode. It also gives customers greater insight into their energy charges and payments, helping them to take control of their bill, and reducing reliance on customer services.

As competition intensifies and wholesale energy prices continue to rise, energy suppliers will look for new ways to lower their cost-to-serve, manage bad debt risk and opportunities to significantly improve customer experience.

Variable Recurring Payments set to take off

One of these opportunities is presented by Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs), a new open banking technology which lets customers safely authorise FCA-regulated payment providers, like Ordo, to make repeated payments on their behalf. The payments must sit within a mandate agreed by the customer and a business, such as an energy supplier.

Fliss Berridge, co-founder at Ordo, explains. “Open banking will make VRPs – repeated payments like monthly utility bills – much smarter, more convenient and efficient. A ‘smart Direct Debit’ if you like.

“VRPs can be set up in minutes rather than weeks, and payment mandate parameters can be changed dynamically, right up to the point of irrevocable payment, meaning businesses and consumers can respond to life events in real time. Payment transfers are also in real time, without long processes and paperwork. Once open banking is used for our regular bills, we’ll wonder how we ever got by waiting.”

Fliss expects companies to start to integrate VRPs in the second half of 2022. She suggests keeping an eye on those businesses which have made a head start on implementing this technology as they begin to deliver the flexibility, improved customer experience and further cost savings it offers.

Notes to editors

You can download Siemens’ Managed Credit technical whitepaper, which presents OFGEM data alongside the cost savings of bank-to-bank transfer compared to other available payment methods.

The Open Banking Implementation Entity 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 marketing@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.

Pledjar describes itself as the charity collection tin of the 21st century, and its premise is simple. It is a digital spare change collection box that drives donations by rounding up small amounts from daily purchases and securely passing them on to charity automatically.

Pledjar logo

As the use of cash continues to decline, it is keeping alive the spirit and principle of giving spare change to charities.

Working with the Charities Aid Foundation, Pledjar supports more than 150 charities worldwide, from big tier one organisations such as Oxfam, Cancer Research UK and Save the Children, through to smaller charities like Sufra based in North-West London and the Lady Fatemah Trust in Buckinghamshire. 

Through open banking technology, Pledjar offers multiple ways for users to donate and can track and show the total of their charitable giving in their own personal ‘jar’.

The most popular service sees the app having visibility of a user’s bank account transactions, rounding up their spends and donating the surplus to their chosen charity. This means for example, for a £15.54 spend at the supermarket, £0.46 could be donated. 

While the micro-donations are small, they soon add up over the course of a few weeks or months and suddenly £20 is donated, which is enough to feed an orphan in a developing country for a month or to buy enough hockey sticks for a team of disabled young people.

Following its launch in 2020,  Pledjar conducted extensive user research wanting to ensure it spoke to the needs and concerns of donors. From this, the organisation has implemented more flexibility, control and transparency for users of its platform and how they choose to donate. These include:  

Benefits for charities

Pledjar can support most charities. This makes it even easier for users to discover new or lesser-known organisations, and to start donating straightaway.

Another benefit of the Pledjar app, which is FCA-authorised, is that there are no hidden fees. Pledjar simply takes 10% of what was raised using its platform, which crucially doesn’t include the Gift Aid amount – and that’s it. If there are no donations, there are no fees. There are no set-up costs, additional costs to donors or minimum fees for hosting.

Setting up is really quick and simple too. The easy two-step process which is completed via Docusign means signing a fundraising agreement and filling out a form for compliance and due diligence can be done in as little as 10 minutes.

"It’s important charities don’t get left behind and miss out on the millions of pounds of donations in spare change." Mujtaba Jaffer, CEO, Pledjar

Disclaimer: The content of this article is based on a discussion with Pledjar and the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) to enable Pledjar to provide details relating its service offering for information purposes only. For more information on the use of our website see: https://www.openbanking.org.uk/terms-conditions/

If you are a third party provider (TPP) and you would like to share your open banking story with us, please email us at marketing@openbanking.org.uk.

The Wonderful Organisation started life in 2016 with a simple aim – to change the face of the UK’s charitable giving platforms by enabling 100% fee-free fundraising and to reach as many charitable organisations as possible.

However, although the team negotiated reduced card processing fees, as the Wonderful platform gained traction, it saw its growth and ability to reach more organisations and donors stunted. More income simply meant more expense.

But open banking changed that.

By implementing open banking and its account-to-account (A2A) payments, Wonderful instantly stopped incurring card processing costs, enabling the non-profit to continue its growth unimpeded.  The organisation:

Wonderful uses Citizen’s account-to-account (A2A) payments platform to process all its donations. The Citizen platform offers a single-view dashboard to view and manage all payments, as well as the ability to verify accounts and import data.

Kieron James, CEO of Wonderful, only sees the upsides for charities when it comes to open banking. He advised: “We would urge charities to embrace the technology and get on board now, while it’s still fairly nascent.”

Wonderful has two arms: Wonderful Payments (a real-time donation processing service) and Wonderful Organisation (the fundraising platform focused on events). In both cases, donors make payments directly from their bank account to their chosen charity’s account – in full.

Open banking appeals to donors because it can both help reduce friction on payments, and minimise security risks.

Donor and fundraisers enjoy complete confidence that the total amount of cash raised or given will go, in its entirety, to the great cause they support.

Fundraisers prefer fee-free charities

Wonderful has also seen a drive from fundraisers expressing a strong preference to work with charities that don’t use an intermediary with processing fees. They want to see all their money raised to benefit the intended organisation.

On the open banking evolution, James said: “There is real power in the third sector. Charities can help increase confidence and familiarity with open banking because, if their A2A payment is a donation, people may be more inclined to trust a bank-to-charity connection than a bank-to-ecommerce one. It all helps.

“If we can get to point that all UK charities are getting 100% of their donations with easy open banking technology, wouldn’t that be genuinely wonderful?”

Find out more in our ebook, ‘The charities guide to growth through open banking’.

Download our free ebook

Disclaimer: Content is based on a discussion with the Wonderful Organisation and the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) to enable Wonderful to provide details relating its service offering for information purposes only. For more information on the use of our website see https://www.openbanking.org.uk/terms-conditions/

If you are a third party provider (TPP) and you would like to share your open banking story with us, please email us at marketing@openbanking.org.uk.

JustGiving is one of the world’s most well-known and trusted platforms for online giving. It helps people raise money for the charities and people they care about.

Since its launch in 2000, the platform has helped raise over £4.4bn for a variety of causes across the world.

A merchant of record, JustGiving works by processing a donation and aggregating funds to a recipient charity registered with the platform.

Before the advent of open banking, the majority of payments made via JustGiving were attributed to either PayPal, or a credit or debit card.

Today it is very much a mobile-first platform, with more than 85% of its donations made using a mobile phone or tablet.

And while 45% of traffic comes via traditional card payments, all other donations are made through digital wallets such as PayPal, Google or Apple Pay and now, crucially, open banking.

The cost of processing payments

In the past couple of years, JustGiving’s business model has changed radically. It is now run as a freemium platform, meaning when someone makes a donation, they are prompted to give a tip which goes directly towards the running of the service.

This ensures all donated funds go straight to the charity or cause, but comes at a cost risk to the platform.

And, like any merchant, JustGiving faces many challenges. These range from the cost of processing these payments, to cash flow and the ability to receive funds in a timely fashion (it still takes between three and four days), to the challenge of card fraud, and charge-back costs.

The open banking journey

Working with American Express’s Pay with Bank Transfer service, JustGiving began using open banking in Christmas 2019 and was the first merchant in the UK to use the technology.

Today open banking represents between 7%-8% of JustGiving’s share of wallet and its benefits are open to any organisation that chooses to use the platform for their charity. Oliver Shaw-Latimer, JustGiving’s Director of Global Fintech, said: “It is like open banking was made for charities.”

The benefits also help tackle a long list of historic challenges.

As money is pushed directly from a donor’s bank account, there is never an issue with insufficient funds. If the cash isn’t there, the payment can’t be made.

And when it comes to cashflow, it’s all taking place in real-time, at the same speed as if you were pushing through your banking app.

With no middleman, JustGiving is now seeing savings of 50%, as well as the displacement of more expensive payment options, such as mobile wallets.

Increased donations via open banking

Shaw-Latimer said: “The average transaction value is almost twice the amount of a regular donation. We feel it’s an indicator people will choose the open banking option when making large donations, for security and fraud reasons.

“We underline open banking as our preferred method. It’s quicker and cheaper, it’s mobile-centric, and the flow is smooth. Ultimately, once you’ve picked your bank, you’re set.”

And JustGiving believes the sector can play a role in the wider adoption of open banking payments among consumers.

Shaw-Latimer said: “Open banking is a seismic change in payments, and it’s particularly applicable to the not-for-profit sector. Charities are always looking to reduce fraud and get money sooner. It’s almost like it’s been designed for them.

“And I think it will follow a similar trajectory to contactless. JustGiving is viewed as the R&D department of the sector so often leads the way. Once adopted, charities will start to pick it up.

“It’s recently been adopted by HMRC too, which indicates that adoption is going up and more people will be using it in the next 12 months. In addition, usage seems to suggest the open banking-enabled payments also lead to higher donations.”

For JustGiving, the future is very much about expanding open banking options, including plans to make it available to personal crowdfunding pages, and rolling it out to support charities across Europe.

Disclaimer: The content of this article is based on a discussion with JustGiving and the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) to enable JustGiving to provide details relating its service offering for information purposes only. For more information on the use of our website see: https://www.openbanking.org.uk/terms-conditions/.

If you are a third party provider (TPP) and you would like to share your open banking story with us, please email marketing@openbanking.org.uk.

Like many organisations, many of the UK’s charities and social enterprises have been hit hard by the pandemic. Nearly two years of on-off lockdowns hit face-to-face fundraising events – a key source of revenue for many charities – and cash donations. Some struggled to retain volunteers, while others faced an increase in demand for their services.

Recent research from The Charities Commission reported that 60% of charities in England and Wales saw a loss of income, and one in four charities with incomes of less than £10k paused their activities completely during the first lockdown.

As charities look towards the post-Covid fundraising landscape, our new publication ‘The charities guide to growth through open banking’, highlights the opportunities offered by open banking payment solutions.

In the guide, we set out how third sector organisations can:

Challenging perceptions

One of the barriers to introducing any new payment or donation method is the perception that it will be expensive and disruptive to day-to-day processes and tasks.

However, the reality is that most open banking applications are free to use and can be up and running within a few hours. All that’s required is an internet-ready device and an internet connection.

How can open banking help cut costs?

Traditionally, a significant portion of donation revenue goes towards individual transaction fees and annual service hosting costs. According to the business website, Startups.co.uk, each card transaction takes a typical fee of between 1-3% meaning processing costs can quickly add up.

In contrast, the cost of receiving payments via open banking tends to be far lower compared with credit or debit cards, online or in-person. This means more revenue going directly to their funds.

There is also often near-instant settlement and access to any money coming in. Thanks to the UK’s retail payments system, Faster Payments, transactions are typically completed within a few seconds meaning donations are on account and available typically more quickly than card-based payments.

What open banking can offer your supporters

Open banking can also present more flexible opportunities to donate, including micro-donations, where donors can opt to round up transaction amounts and give permission for the surplus (within agreed limits) to be transferred to their chosen charity.

The pandemic has also seen an increase in the use of QR codes, and using a QR code on a leaflet, magazine or billboard means a charity’s donation journey can start anywhere, without the need for specialist apps or a point-of-sale machine.

There are some additional benefits of using open banking too.  

Lack of middleman cuts costs and drives donations up

According to the charity platform JustGiving, it has found that, with no middleman, it is seeing savings of 50%, as well as the displacement of more expensive payment options, such as mobile wallets.

And the ability to donate direct – with the knowledge that all the donated funds will be going direct to the supporter’s chosen cause – has, in some instances, led to an increase in donations as well as cost savings.

The average transaction value is almost twice the amount of a regular donation. We feel it’s an indicator people will choose the open banking option when making large donations, for security and fraud reasons.

Oliver Shaw-Latimer, Director of Global Fintech, JustGiving

Shaw-Latimer concluded: “We underline open banking as our preferred [payment] method. It’s quicker and cheaper, it’s mobile-centric, and the flow is smooth. Ultimately, once you’ve picked your bank, you’re set.”

Read the ebook