Open banking – how we got here

In the five years since the creation of open banking in the UK, there are now more than seven million users of the technology and growing.

Millions of consumers and businesses are using open banking-enabled tools, ranging from budgeting and savings apps to help manage their money, or benefiting from up-to-date insights on their cash flow, and embedded finance links in their accounting software to help them get paid faster.

There’s been significant progress since the start of open banking’s journey, but so far, open banking products have been confined to payments, personal and business current accounts, and credit applications. This is a limitation.

As open banking evolves, and we start the journey to open finance, we explore some of its current and potential uses and benefits and look beyond to ‘smart data’ – applying the same data sharing principles to other economic sectors.