Andrew Pinder CBE has been appointed as Implementation Trustee to oversee the delivery of an industry-wide project to deliver a new secure option for customers to be able to compare the deal they are getting from their banking.

The Implementation Trustee is leading the work with responsibility to deliver the ‘open API standard for banking’ set out in the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) retail banking market investigation.*

Andrew has a long and distinguished career in both the private and public sectors, with senior level roles in financial and IT organisations. He is regarded as a global thought-leader in the development of the knowledge economy due to high-profile roles such as leading the Office of the e-Envoy from 2000 to 2005, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. Andrew is currently also Chairman of Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited (DMSL) and Non-Executive Director at Nominet, the registry for UK domain names.

Andrew Pinder, Implementation Trustee, said:

“We are fortunate in this country to have a thriving financial services sector, encompassing well-established brands with illustrious histories, through to nimble FinTechs with the potential to shake things up.

“Open Banking has the potential to harness technology to deliver a win-win by enabling providers of all shapes and sizes to create dramatically improved products that are more competitive, intuitive, personalised, convenient and integrated. I am greatly looking forward to leading the work that can make this happen.”

Bill Roberts, Assistant Director, Remedies, Business and Financial Analysis at the CMA, said:

“Open Banking is at the core of the CMA’s recommendations for transforming retail banking. Implementing an open API standard will ensure that banking services are tailored to personal and business account customers’ specific needs.

“This will be a challenging project, which will be crucial to successfully reforming the retail banking industry. We are therefore delighted that Andrew Pinder, with his enormous expertise in delivering major projects for Government and regulators, will be in charge of driving the process forward.”

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for electronic information held in one place to be shared in a controlled and highly secure way: it enables third parties that meet security and service standards to access data and use it to offer services and products. In the retail banking market, a new API standard could transform competition by giving customers more control over their finances, making it easier to access and compare product and service information from different providers.

The CMA has required that an implementation entity be set up and funded by the nine banks in the UK with the largest market share (RBS Group, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, HSBC Group, Nationwide, Santander, Danske, Bank of Ireland and AIB Group). They have been required by the CMA to deliver the first stage of the project by the end of March 2017, covering publicly available data such as branch opening hours and ATM locations, and information relating to prices, charges and eligibility criteria for loans and personal and business current accounts. Other interested providers will be able to participate in the service and offer it under the same terms as the nine named banks. The second deliverable is the sharing, with customer consent, of customers’ transactional data by January 2018.

The implementation entity is seeking expertise and insight from stakeholders including consumer and SME (small and medium enterprise) representative groups, other payment service providers, the FinTech sector and others, through advisory groups. Early work-streams for the new entity will include work on both data and security, with regular updates on the progress of the work planned to be published on the implementation entity’s website.**