The term Open Banking started to gain notoriety in 2016 as a direct result of the UK’s Competitions Market Authority announcing plans for the top 9 banks in the UK to deliver open source APIs for 3rd party use by January 2018. Open Banking has been introduced in many countries around the world with varying regulatory controls. As a result, Open Banking is now seen by many in the industry as a compliance project and is facing internal resistance.

Open Banking drew global attention in 2016 as a direct result of the UK’s Competitions Market Authority announcing plans for the top 9 banks in the UK to deliver open source Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for 3rd party use by January 2018. Since then, Open Banking has been introduced in many countries around the world with varying regulatory and standardisation controls. In the UK the regulatory framework and cost of entry has seen significant shortcomings in the uptake of Open Banking.

The Open Banking deadline is nearing for Data Holders, the major banks have already complied with product reference data, whereas non major ADIs including nonmajor banks, building societies and credit unions, are well set to comply with these requirements by Oct 1st, 2020. While the compliance timelines for disclosure to accredited data recipients is still a few quarters away (phase-1 for major banks is Oct 2020 and for non-major banks/ADIs/ building society/credit unions is July 2021), the financial institutions have also started to define their strategy around being a Data Recipient. We are seeing a varied set of approaches to the Open Banking Consumer Data Right (CDR) compliance requirements.