How open banking became a great British success story

Over the past few years financial technology has stepped up a gear. The way we spend, save, borrow and invest is now changing rapidly

Money Dashboard app © Money Dashboard
Apps such as Money Dashboard are grouping people’s bank accounts together on one page
(Image credit: Money Dashboard app © Money Dashboard)

Open banking is a great British success story. Launched in 2018, this initiative, backed by the government, regulators and industry, lets third-party providers access your financial information at the touch of a button, but only after you’ve given explicit consent (renewed every 90 days). The idea is to connect various service providers to your bank account and thus benefit from a wide range of products and services that are tailored to your needs because they are based on analysing your data.

Around 300 financial technology firms (“fintechs”) and innovative-finance providers have joined the open-banking network and more than 2.5 million British consumers and businesses now use open banking-enabled products to manage their finances, access credit and make payments. One practical measure of success is that so-called API call volume – which gauges how many times an app has accessed data – has increased from 66.8 million in 2018 to nearly six billion in 2020.

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David C. Stevenson
Contributor

David Stevenson has been writing the Financial Times Adventurous Investor column for nearly 15 years and is also a regular columnist for Citywire. He writes his own widely read Adventurous Investor SubStack newsletter at davidstevenson.substack.com

David has also had a successful career as a media entrepreneur setting up the big European fintech news and event outfit www.altfi.com as well as www.etfstream.com in the asset management space. 

Before that, he was a founding partner in the Rocket Science Group, a successful corporate comms business. 

David has also written a number of books on investing, funds, ETFs, and stock picking and is currently a non-executive director on a number of stockmarket-listed funds including Gresham House Energy Storage and the Aurora Investment Trust. 

In what remains of his spare time he is a presiding justice on the Southampton magistrates bench.