European deposit marketplace Raisin has passed $6mn in brokered savings deposits; deposits grew by more than $3.5mn in 2017 and they saw their international customer base grow by 20 percent; the company acquired PBF Solutions, passed 100,000 customers, added 12 new partner banks and received more than $49mn in interest income last year; “We are pleased to be able to offer savers throughout Europe an attractive alternative.” said Tamaz Georgadze, CEO and founding member, to AltFi. Source.
Skinner shares some of the headlines by mainstream media as Open Banking officially launched in the UK; many were negative and included how consumers should fear the changes; not surprisingly the fintech community are strong advocates of Open Banking; Skinner shares his perspective on these two sides battling, the mainstream banks and mainstream media, and the fintech community and more niche media. Source
Banks have historically been the guardians of customer information, but that has started to change with open banking; opening up information to third parties via customers has led banks to think more and more about security breaches; Now it’s not just about building a wall and not letting anyone in,” said Ram Bose, global retail banking consulting leader at Genpact, to TearSheet. “It’s about building a filter or strainer that lets some things in or out and not other things.”; the UK has regulations that mandate the sharing of info but the US has only set out standards and banks have been doing one off deals; new technologies like AI and machine learning can help to better secure agreements when banks are working with 20 or more potential partners; it is early days but banks can help to set up the standards they use by working together with fintechs and regulators. Source.
Open Banking, seen as a potential game changing regulatory change, is set to launch in the next few days in the UK; Open Banking requires banks to allow fintechs and other third parties to have access to customer data if the consumer agrees to grant access; the new law will allow for a safer data exchange, in the past consumers shared their login details and third parties scraped the data, and standardize access across the UK and Europe; while banks have pushed back on the coming change this will allow customers to better control their information and tailor services to their lifestyles. Source.
Open source projects have started at Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase in the past year, there is a thought that this is the start a new wave of open source banking; Accenture found that 99 out of 100 payments executives at banks said they plan to make big open banking investments by 2020; open source projects like Linux has help the tech industry develop into what it is today; banks like CBW Bank, who is run by former Google engineer Suresh Ramamurthi, already have a marketplace where developers can build banking apps using their APIs; open source banking can also help to keep banks more secure as the big tech giants have been helped a lot by using open source applications. Source.
Fundbox is already operating in an open banking environment allowing third party access to information; “What Fundbox is doing is indicative of this next wave of open banking and leveraging APIs to embed functionality in the longer tail of places where small businesses do work,” said Alenka Grealish, senior analyst at Celent, to American Banker; the company learned from past integration issues and created Fundbox Fuse which is a set of HTML code for lite integration; they announced new integrations with Bookly, AND CO, Billy, Paid and Knowify with the hopes of integrating to thousands of platforms to help democratize access to credit. Source.
The Open Banking Implementation Entity or OBIE chose regtech firm Contego to support OBIE’s identity proofing and verification processes; Nigel Spencer, head of support services at OBIE, tells Banking Technology that Contego delivered a “bespoke solution that combines automated identity checks with the added security of face-to-face verification” and this made the firm “the obvious choice”.; the company can customize their solution and deliver in real time via API. Source.
With open banking starting last week in the UK, we might soon see a global push as Hong Kong is looking to explore the idea; the CFPB in the US recently came out with data sharing guidelines that look to begin creating a framework for future legislation; there is not yet the expectation that Hong Kong will adopt such regulations but they did ask for banks and fintechs to weigh in on the open API framework; the FT also sits down with former Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins to further discuss open banking and what it could mean for all participants. Source.
WeChat recently started to offer users access to mutual funds, just another service they were able to add to the platform; the open platform based approach where you can plug in different services through an API is where financial services is headed; while those in Europe and the US might not be as advanced as China they know innovation like this is coming; “It really shows incumbents that they’ll need yet again to pivot to a new platform; that it’s not the bank that’s the platform anymore,” April Rudin, chief executive of wealth management marketing firm The Rudin Group, tells TearSheet; message based financial advice is the next natural step for clients who have transformed the way they interact in recent years from the phone call to the text message or chat service. Source.
With open banking set to go live in Europe next month US banks will be keeping a close eye on how the process works; US banks have started to share data with fintechs through different partnerships for different reasons; the time is coming where the industry will have to look at open banking as a regulatory standard and some think the banks should really be the ones to set the parameters; coming up with a potential global set of standards is something that could really benefit all parties involved; “You need to globalize that at consistency so you don’t have different standards for each country in Asia, for example,” said Cynthia Murray, a managing director at Bank of America, to TearSheet. Source.