Beyond Open Banking: the rise of open initiatives

Open initiatives such as open data, open health, open energy, and open insurance are exceeding the borders of traditional financial services. They are shaping ecosystems that combine regulatory reform, data accessibility, and innovation to tackle systemic challenges, unlock revenue models, and overall improve user experience.

Sector-specific frameworks such as Open Banking and Open Finance inspired a broader trend of open initiatives, an evolution toward multi-domain data ecosystems that innovate across health, energy, insurance, and public services. Emerging across the globe, these types of movements reshape how data is shared, harnessed, and legislated, which gives way to new opportunities for financial services, risk management, and sustainability-linked investments.

The Open Data ecosystem: a new infrastructure for innovation

Open Data is an initiative that seeks to make data pools freely available for repurposing across industries (e.g. financial, health, energy, etc.); more and more decision makers have begun to recognise Open Data as a foundational infrastructure, similar to roads or electricity grids. The proposed benefits are: enabling transparent decision-making, reducing friction in markets, and catalysing innovation.

The European Union’s open data strategy exemplifies this shift in mentality, ‘aiming at creating a single market for data that will ensure Europe’s global competitiveness and data sovereignty’.

The EU Open Data Days 2025 brought together policymakers, researchers, and industry leaders to address ‘open data ecosystems and governance’, interoperability, and data reuse across sectors, signaling a mature policy focus on creating value across sectors.

According to Europe’s Open Data Maturity Report 2025, public data availability and quality are improving across member states, with recommendations to prioritise high-value datasets and build thematic communities to maximise reuse.

Beyond Europe, open government data platforms highlight how Open Data can be used to improve transparency and digital service development globally. A great example is Saudi Arabia; its Open Data Platform has over 11,000 datasets from the health, environment, labour, and education sectors, bridging the gap government and citizens.

Open Data is more than a civic service; it can directly inform and impact financial markets, risk models, and investment decisions. More accessible data leads to richer analytics and faster, evidence-based policy responses.

Open Health

Open Health initiatives are becoming more relevant for financial services because health data is a core input for insurance pricing, risk modelling, impact financing, and digital health payments.

A good example is openIMIS, an open-source platform used to administer health insurance and social protection schemes in multiple African countries. It supports enrolment, claims processing, benefit management, and provider payments, helping governments and insurers reduce administrative costs and improve transparency in reimbursements. For fintech and payments players, such platforms demonstrate how standardised health data and payment workflows can be digitised at scale, enabling embedded insurance and benefits wallets.

For fintech and payments stakeholders, open health data can give rise to new financial products, such as digital health wallets, employer wellness financing, personalised insurance premiums, and embedded financial services within consumer platforms. As health systems become digitalised, data portability and interoperability will increasingly intersect with payments, identity, and credit decisioning.

Open Energy

Open Energy data is becoming a critical asset class for investors, lenders, and insurers, particularly as capital flows into decarbonisation and infrastructure. Transparent datasets reduce information asymmetry, lower financing costs, and support scalable climate finance.

For fintechs, open energy data enables usage-based financial services. Smart meters and IoT-driven billing generate granular consumption data that can be combined with open datasets to offer dynamic tariffs, pay-as-you-go energy financing, and energy-linked credit products. In emerging markets, micro-lenders use electrification and consumption data to evaluate household repayment capacity, supporting energy-access financing and embedded payments.

Open energy data also intersects with digital payments through automated settlement and smart contracts, particularly in decentralised energy markets and peer-to-peer trading. As energy markets digitalise, the integration of open datasets with payment rails could enable real-time settlement, tokenised renewable credits, and usage-based insurance products, creating new fintech-energy convergence models.

Open Insurance 

Voluntary industry initiatives like Open Insurance (OPIN) aim to foster open APIs and data standards that facilitate data interoperability across insurance providers, with an emphasis on customer-centric data sharing and ecosystem partnerships.

In Brazil, regulatory efforts have also been directed toward Open Insurance frameworks under SUSEP governance, which aim to empower consumers and improve competition by standardising how insurers share products and claims data.

Open insurance can transform financial risk markets by enabling parametric insurance models, real-time underwriting, and finely segmented pricing that reflect real-world conditions and customer behaviour.

Challenges for open initiatives

Despite progress, key challenges remain:

• Privacy and trust: health, energy, and insurance data involve sensitive information where governance, consent frameworks, and security are paramount.
• Interoperability: technical standards and data formats vary by sector and jurisdiction, slowing integration and reuse.
• Economic incentives: aligning Open Data publication with business outcomes requires clear value propositions for both public and private actors.

Converging Open Data policies with financial innovation, sustainability goals, and risk markets creates compelling incentives. Open initiatives are not just a public sector transparency play, they are future-proof infrastructure for data-driven finance, sustainable investment, and resilient markets.

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