In a bid to crowdsource what the company describes as the seeds of a new industry standard, the implementation of the new service will be guided by a “council” of players both from within the industry and without. Founding members of the council include fintechs such as Wealthify and Scalable Capital as well as more established industry figures like AJ Bell.

Speaking at Money 2020 in Amsterdam, Bud’s Jamie Campbell walked the audience through the plans to provide open banking access (account aggregation and payments), access to third party products and data enrichments like transaction categorisation to companies through a single API access point launching later this year.

As Campbell explained on the day, giving people the ability to put their data to good use is a powerful concept but to deliver on that potential, companies need to be able to receive and process those requests. By giving single-point access to financial APIs, companies can overcome the resource pressures and prioritisation conflicts that are standing in the way of offering Open Banking enabled service to their customers. Bud.X will not only contain aggregation and payment capabilities but other microservices such as categorisation, foreign exchange fee calculations, ‘smart balance’ (income, minus fixed outgoings), for affordability, access to third party products and much more.
According to Campbell, the infrastructure behind the exchange is already complete while the ongoing work with the council focuses on prioritising enrichments, fine-tuning due diligence processes and designing the architecture in a way that makes the service quick and easy-to-use.

Open Banking is going nowhere until the really compelling use cases start to surface. Built on the premise that we can do more together, the exchange leverages our relationship with more than 70 connected partners to create a single place where designing these compelling experiences is simple and fast.

The vision is to create a network of everything. This is only a first step but it’s one that will open up the possibilities that Open Banking offers and help boost innovation. Bud, at its core, is a collaborative company, so building this new tool with industry participation feels right.”