Retail banks have long held a competitive advantage because they kept a tight grasp on their customer data, allowing them to own the relationship with their customers and hence making the barriers to entry for competitors prohibitively high.
Open Banking’s core tenets aim to facilitate greater competition, innovation, and consumer choice within financial services, by asking banks to make their data open and available through Application Programming Interfaces (API) – provided the customer consents – so that third parties can offer new, innovative financial services, such as triggering payments from a customer’s account.
For online businesses, Open Banking represents an opportunity to gain an even deeper insight into customer behaviour and grow sales. This puts payment providers in an ideal position to help businesses access and analyse critical, value-enhancing data and unlock the full potential of Open Banking.
With such huge potential and a clear case for it being in the public interest, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and the EU, through their Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), have both mandated that banks adopt the Open Banking Standard. This in turn has created a single payment market within the EU, allowing for innovation and the cross-pollination of ideas. At the centre of this is banks opening their APIs to other companies, mainly Third-Party Payment Services Providers (TPPs). Additional authentication and third-party access requirements have since been put into force and now Open Banking marries both the flexibility and security everyone insists upon while removing friction from transactions between companies.
For Open Banking to take off, it is vitally important that consumers are assured their data will be protected. In Europe, this has largely been made possible by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which provides a standard dictating how any organisation holding, or providing access to, consumer data must secure that information. With access to consumer banking data, TPPs will be able to innovate a broad range of new financial products and services that offer customers more choices untethered to the bank they hold their accounts with. Primarily, PSD2 will also promote greater competition and improve efficiency by removing friction.
Open Banking is rapidly enabling businesses to offer new payment options. By accessing the customer’s account information through the bank’s API, online businesses will be able to:
Open Banking will give online businesses access to Instant Payments infrastructure, meaning that funds can be immediately remitted into the account from the payer.
Chargeback fraud or so-called ‘friendly fraud’ is a major source of lost revenue and lost goodwill to online retailers. With Open Banking there is no Chargeback mechanics by design, instead allowing companies to offer much fairer and more efficient dispute resolution alternatives.
Account-to-Account (A2A) payments are initiated without interchange or scheme fees. Therefore, A2A can be up to 80% cheaper than card payments for merchants. Consumers could also benefit from these lower costs, as the merchant may pass some of the savings to the consumer.
All businesses can create a branded payment solution, integrating ideas like points and loyalty schemes or delayed payment. Likewise, they can analyse banking data to identify relevant audiences and target more tailored offers and discounts based on a customer’s transaction history.
Ecommerce companies will be able to embed bank account information into online store checkouts, displaying the shopper’s account balance and transaction history, allowing them to keep control over their spending and the availability of funds.
These are some examples of what is currently available. Open Banking is just getting started, and future applications could include AI-enabled ‘predictive banking’ that anticipates customer demand ahead of time and intelligent personalised Direct Debits that consider the customer’s lifestyle (when they pay rent and get paid for instance).
Open Banking has the potential to radically change the financial services and payments landscape, so it’s something that online businesses should be giving very serious consideration to. In the short term, it enables to offer more cost-effective payment methods. In the long-term, Open Banking will allow online businesses to gain a detailed insight into consumer financial behaviour, which could be used to build customer loyalty, customer credit scoring, and provide more personalised payment options.
At Worldline, we utilise our expertise in the payments space to create custom payment solutions to enable swifter payments with optimised costs. The complexity of working with the APIs is handled by Worldline, so businesses can concentrate on providing a first-class service to their consumers. This new development will bring the possibility of leveraging data previously held by banks to give consumers new and more in-depth, compelling payment experiences that increases engagement.
This article has first been published in the Open Banking and Open Finance Report 2022. Click here to download the report.
Guillaume Tournand is VP of Growth for Worldline Digital Commerce. In this role, Guillaume is dedicated to expanding the value proposition via geographical expansion, APM, partnerships, and M&A.
Worldline is a global leader in the payments industry and the technology partner of choice for merchants, banks, and acquirers. Powered by c. 20,000 employees in more than 50 countries, Worldline provides its clients with sustainable, trusted, and innovative solutions fostering their growth. Services offered by Worldline include in-store and online commercial acquiring, highly secure payment transaction processing, and numerous digital services. In 2021 Worldline generated a proforma revenue of close to EUR 4 billion.
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