Recent research from ING suggested that consumers remain suspicious and uninformed about open banking despite it now being firmly embedded into the financial services ecosystem across parts of Europe and elsewhere.
The Dutch bank’s research - polled from 13 European countries - finds that only 30% of customers are comfortable for customers to share their data. Only 35%, meanwhile, have heard that companies have this capability with their consent.
Open Banking means banks and other companies can access consumers financial information with their consent. This enables companies outside of the incumbents to build products and services that increase competition and potentially give customers greater choice in the market. For example, a fintech innovator or challenger bank can build aggregation tools that present consumers with a single view of all their finances in one place and use this data to offer financial planning advice and to build applications that can do so in an intelligent and personalised way.
As ING research indicates, though, there remains an attitude-behaviour gap. Consumers will certainly be enticed by increased choices of providers for their financial needs, having experienced decades of feeling ‘locked in’ to a single institution. However, it seems less likely that they will grant access to their personal data to companies to offer these. This emphasises the task banks have in promoting the security of open banking, as well as the benefits, while safeguarding the trust advantage they continue to enjoy.
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