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Twelve months on, and even those behind the new regime acknowledge the predicted deluge has so far been more of a trickle.
Yet after a year of laying the technical foundations, the architects of the regulation say that 2019 will be a “big year” for customers as they prepare to extend the rules’ reach to help them meet early expectations.
Open Banking builds on European regulations that require banks to share data by forcing the UK’s largest providers to meet specific standards, in theory allowing financial technology, or fintech, innovators to make products that can connect to every bank and be used by any customer.
Some people in the sector say fintechs have overhyped the speed at which they can achieve this overhaul to drum up interest from investors, while start-ups blame banks for slowing progress by creating unreliable systems.
Having spent hundreds of millions of pounds developing the infrastructure, big banks are also starting to look for their own ways to make use of the new features.
A senior banker at one of the largest high street banks says: “You can’t underestimate the size of the technical challenge given the timeframe we were given to deliver this. There’s a bandwidth question, it was only once we broke the back of that initial delivery that we could free up the teams to say ‘now let’s think about how we can really use this’.”
All the UK’s biggest banks have launched, or are close to launching, their own aggregator apps that allow users to see information from different accounts in one place, with more advanced products in development. Mr Gulamhuseinwala says: “You’d expect in 2019 for [aggregators] to become a basic hygiene factor for competing in retail banking and I think it’s going to move on from there.”
The senior banker adds that his own company has seen increasing amounts of activity from others testing its systems, suggesting that the volume of products in development is gaining momentum.
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