UK Open Banking expanded to cover all PSD2 products

UK Open Banking expanded to cover all PSD2 products

The UK's Open Banking project is being expanded to embrace all payment account types - including credit cards, prepaid cards and e-wallets - covered by PSD2.

In a bid to boost competition and innovation, last year the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) told the nine largest current account providers in Great Britain and Northern Ireland to set up a body to build common API standards to let customers share their financial data with non-bank providers.

With the core set of requirements coming into force in January, the CMA and UK Treasury is already looking ahead to expanding the project to let bank customers using credit cards, e-wallets and prepaid cards take advantage of open banking services through a programme of releases over the next two years.

Imran Gulamhuseinwala, trustee of the Open Banking Implementation Entity, says: "Key to any innovation is the process of discovery and it became clear through the second half of 2017 that there is much more the OBIE could do to drive adoption of Open Banking and create a richer environment for new services.

"These enhancements should give even greater confidence to the fintech community to seize the opportunity to participate fully in the financial services ecosystem. They will create standards for future dated, recurring and international payments as well as all the payment and product types covered by PSD2."

Comments: (3)

A Finextra member
A Finextra member 22 November, 2017, 16:581 like 1 like

if open banking is to be anything other than an anti-climax when it goes live, there needs to a huge and intensive public education campaign by the regulator and the banks. We're less than two months from launch, and consumer awareness of what is happening is virtually non-existent.

Jonathan Williams
Jonathan Williams - Mk2 Consulting Ltd - Rugby 23 November, 2017, 09:22Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes Extended to all _consumer and SME_ PSD2 products, not into the corporate world yet. Is that because it assumes that the corporate world is well served for open banking interfaces? In any case, PSD2/Payment Services Regulations 2017 makes no distinction in this regard between consumers and legal persons.
Ketharaman Swaminathan
Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 23 November, 2017, 18:12Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

The vision / rationale of PSD2 / Open Banking is that (1) There's a lot of value in customer's banking data (2) Banks are doing nothing with that data (3) Customers are deprived of all the insights they can gain from their data (4) Ergo customer's banking data should be thrown open to third-parties to mine and generate insights that are useful to customers. 

Going by this, customers should be clamoring for PSD2 products and services and creating tremendous buzz for them, thus providing viral distribution of these offerings.

If this is not happening and if a huge public education campaign is required to just create awareness of PSD2, then the basic premise of PSD2 becomes somewhat questionable. Forget anti-climax, PSD2 offerings would be Dead on Arrival.

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