We can think of Open Banking and PSD2 as the Expedia for banking. It will fundamentally change our everyday interaction with our banks in the future, as well as the way we make payments and the way banks look at and use customer data. It will help to open up the market to new players who provide consumers with new ways to manage their money and make payments.
The maturity of various markets varies with the UK and Nordics pioneering the journey. Central banks supporting digital evolution but mindful of reliable contingency solutions to be in place in case of impact from a major cyber event. Majority of large players find it refreshing to partner and collaborate with more dynamic and agile third-parties and there is no one size fits all. Most successful journeys happen in the countries where the Regulators collaborate closely with the market players and embrace evolution, driving innovation. This leads to discovering new approaches, such as the use of ultrasounds.
Customer experience trust and security remain key in all of these. Innovation in the market that gives consumers greater choice, control and transparency should be embraced, and Open Banking will be a significant opportunity for the industry to work together to shape the future of financial services. But at the same time, it asks some important questions about how we protect our customers’ data and keep it secure, particularly in light of the introduction of GDPR.
For consumers, the issue of trust is becoming ever more important. Being able to trust service providers with data throughout the customer journey is becoming a vital part of the customer experience. With the development of Open Banking, the nature of those journeys is changing fundamentally.
This isn’t just an issue for individual providers and we have to tackle this as an industry. Of course, it’s got to be slow and steady to succeed. It’s a phased start with gradual uptake and there’s a lot of work to be done to improve customer experience, reduce friction and increase customer confidence.
The regulators are still to provide clarity on APIs, screen scraping and other methods. But as an industry, we need to ensure we deliver compliance obligations safely and securely for customers without overcomplicating things by adding too many other things into the mix.
Do we expect PSD3? May be not at that scale but further evolution of PSD2 to handle some of the new questions are now awaited by the industry and market players.