It is a year since the UK embarked on its Open Banking reforms, mandating banks to share their data with regulated third parties. In three months’ time, all major banks in Australia will need to open their customer data on credit and debit cards, deposit as well as transaction accounts. Open Banking appears to be gaining traction globally, but should large MNC’s be interested?

East & Partners Asia-Pacific survey

The recent East & Partners showed that: although there is a medium level of corporate awareness, and corporates believe that the top benefits will be to:

Nothing new? 

MNCs are well aware of these trends which have existed for 2-3 years and probably longer. But in personal banking Open banking could be huge as DevOps engineer Tim Greening-Jackson of managed hosting provider UKFast explained to Alistair Hardaker at BusiessCloud: “Along with the ubiquity of the cloud and mobile networking open banking enables a whole host of innovative products and services.” This could involve:

• more nuanced insights into customer habits, allowing finer granularity with a broader scope than that from a traditional loyalty card.
• ability to track and analyse a consumer's own pattern of spending will drive highly innovative applications, particularly when integrated with various existing application types.

Clearly, the security of each consumer’s account is going to be paramount because they are going to be asked to give each retail brand explicit permission to access their bank account.  Unless they do the so-called advantages of open banking won’t exist. Companies are going to have to pay heavily for this access permission. 

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CTMfile take: Companies are unlikely to ever give permission for third parties to access their business accounts. Also on a personal level, all corporate treasurers CTMfile have talked to they will NOT give permission on their personal accounts either. It is all a matter of trust. Will Open Banking ever take off??