Today marks the official launch of Open Vector, a new strategic change advisory firm specialising in providing Open Banking consulting services to C-level banking executives.
The UK, mandated by the Competition & Market Authority (CMA), comprises the first country of global financial services significance to embrace open banking at the beginning of 2018.
Open Vector is led by Carlos Figueredo, CEO and Francesca Smith, Chairman, who have conducted senior advisory roles to the CMA’s mandated initiative, an initiative created specifically to accelerate the adoption of retail banking reform recommendations. The CMA’s initiative was created to enable increased competition in the retail banking sector through the secure sharing of retail consumer and SME customer data to enable improved choice of products and services, catalysing and leveraging innovation through FinTech activity.
Carlos Figueredo, CEO, commented. "We are very excited about Open Vector and what this potentially means to the global financial services sector. The Open Vector team has been responsible for defining a number of the published UK open banking directives and we collectively bring first-hand experience and deep insights across the entire national spectrum of open banking mandates. This depth and breadth of knowledge is a scarce commodity.”
Francesca Smith, Chairman, commented, “With the imminent UK January 2018 deadline, when the nine mandated significant UK-based, systemically important global banks need to publicly demonstrate technical compliance with the forthcoming regulations, Open Vector is in a unique position to help these financial organisations and others within this ecosystem, such as challenger banks, third party providers, payments organisations and FinTechs, prepare to leverage the opportunities that open banking presents.”
Both concurred, “We are confident that the combined specialist expertise of Open Vector’s growing team will have a tremendously positive impact, not only on the UK firms that are already engaging with Open Vector, but also in the other geographies, such as Australia and Canada who look set to follow the UK's lead in the adoption of Open Banking standards.”