Open Banking was introduced during the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) period, with technology profoundly transforming our world, impacting businesses, societies, economies, cultures, and personal lives. It all started by giving consumers more control over how and when their banking data was being shared. This has steadily evolved to Open Finance, allowing third-party data exchanges to affect a broader range of financial services, payments, and digital experiences, for example, allowing consumers to compare products and deals, and switch more easily between service providers — and for companies to access and use detailed consumer data in real-time.
Once again, thanks to the 4IR, there has been enablement and fostering of industry convergence. Today’s industries are dramatically changing — increasing digitisation and new business models have transformed different industries and will continue to do so. At the same time, boundaries between previously disconnected sectors are disappearing, with financial services increasingly being democratised and embedded into other non-financial services players, commerce, government, transportation, etc. Open Banking has evolved into Open Finance, which has also fueled the acceleration of embedded finance. Spurred by the rapid adoption of new technologies alongside the boundless demands in consumer preferences and behaviour, this brings us to the next digital frontier — Open Data Economies and Monetisation.
To date, financial institutions have spent so much effort and investment on compliance that they haven’t really turned their minds to compete in earnest. This is missing the bigger picture — although compliance is highly complex and must be a priority, building an Open Banking foundation offers organisations important new opportunities to derive value from consumer data. If data is the new oil, behaviour is the new data. Every financial transaction generates data. The value of the data is in the ability to generate hyper-personalised, autonomous, actionable insights, often in seconds.
For example, in financial services, purchasing the latest LED LCD TV could prompt an immediate alert in the consumer’s banking app or laptop to ‘click here to update your household insurance.’ Or receiving a bonus could trigger a mutual fund message: ‘Congratulations on your bonus. Putting it into a mutual fund now would make a USD xxx difference to your retirement income.’
In energy, retailers will be able to use data access to innovate tariff structures using information from detailed household profiles, offering business clients carbon-saving roadmaps, or providing add-ons like battery storage as a service.
As Open Data innovation spreads, we expect to see increased cross-industry collaboration and the rise of hyper-efficient new business models.
While new data sources via Open Banking are giving financial institutions and other organisations like big techs and fintechs access to rich, real-time information to meet this new urgency, without the right people, data, technology capabilities, policy controls, governance, and operating models, data monetisation can turn into data liability and loss of brand trust.
With that in mind, some key solution principles include:
The big learning experience for the banking sector is not to build your own ‘table-stakes’ compliance technology. Developing a consumer data right (CDR) compliance platform requires a significant and ongoing programme to surface data, make it available and secure, and get customer consent to access it. Cloud-based platforms are already available and can be delivered as a service, requiring no internal resources to operate. For example, the EY Fuse Open Banking solution helps authorised deposit-taking institutions (ADIs) comply quickly with CDR regulations and standards, while also helping them leverage CDR data to compete in the data economy.
Now is the moment to decide how to use open data access to create new markets, attract new customers, and monetise high-value data. Otherwise, organisations will simply end up paying for the cost of compliance and watching their customers give their data (and their relationship) to someone else.
According to the EY Global future consumer index, 62% of consumers are willing to share more personal data to receive offers that are more suited for long-term goals. Consumers in general use over 5.3 GB of contextual data on search engines and social media platforms to determine whether a product or service is relevant for them. This puts pressure and also creates opportunities for institutions to innovate and embrace ecosystem data, but complex legacy systems make it almost impossible to experiment.
Partnership in a cloud-based, highly modular, event-driven, integrated ecosystem and scalable transformation platform becomes essential. EY Nexus for Banking, for example, helps financial institutions reimagine products and services, and brings new ideas to market faster, enabling a consistent focus on customer needs and use cases, and less on the technology itself.
Open Data is ultimately about the freer flow of information to improve knowledge sharing and access to information for the greater benefit of consumers, enterprises, government, and the economy (Emerging Payment Association Asia (EPAA) Open Data Workshop Report February 2022). We are moving into the Fifth Industrial Revolution, an era that focuses on amplifying purpose, humanity, and inclusivity to bring more sustainable innovations that synthesise the strength emerging from the collaboration between machine and human intelligence. The benefits of Open Data to consumers, businesses, and financial institutions are apparent and move beyond financial services to become truly embedded into our daily lives with purpose. We are expecting to see more technology-led interoperability, cross-border harmonisation, and collaboration between established institutions and digital disruptors.
The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organisation or its member firms.
This article has first been published in the Open Banking Report 2022. Click here to download the report.
May has over 23 years of technology leadership and business transformation experience across banking and financial services, fintech, payments, and the public sector in Asia-Pacific. Her areas of knowledge include payments ecosystem, enterprise agility, product and services innovation, operating model optimisation, B2B2C go-to-market strategy, program delivery and governance.
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