OUTPUTS (AVAILABILITY)

Headlines

As of December 2020, there were 109 firms with live-to-market open banking-enabled products and services
Each month since launch in January 2018, on average 3.2 services have come to market
Growth in live propositions has been 76%, December 2020 vs December 2019
There are now 36 providers with available products and services to help end users improve their financial decision making
There are 25 offering expanded payments choice
21 Better Borrowing propositions are available
To date there is lower availability of solutions addressing Increased Savings and Investments (5), Increased Switching (2) and Increased Access to Advice (2)
There are 37 propositions available for consumers, 25 for small businesses and 47 addressing both

Methodology

The first core element of the open banking Consumer Evaluation Framework is the analysis of Outputs, measured through availability of propositions in the market. As per the framework based on that developed by the Personal Finance Research Centre (PFRC), these Immediate Outcomes are steps towards the desired final outcomes and therefore valuable to track and monitor in their own right. Outputs was defined as “Availability – a wide range of technology-enabled financial products and services is available2 ”. We have built on this base definition through wide ecosystem consultation and defined six Outcome Areas. These Outcome Areas encompass both the key outcomes envisaged in the CMA Retail Bank Market Investigation and the range of open banking-enabled propositions in the market today.

This analysis is based on the availability of live to market open banking-enabled propositions as at 31 December 2021. The full methodology of this analysis is included in the notes underneath each piece of analysis, but the key elements to note are:

Through interviews with providers of open banking-enabled products and services, internal profiling and publicly available data we have reviewed the proposition(s) offered to end users by each provider.

From this propositional analysis we have then allocated each provider to one primary outcome area. We recognise that some providers with more developed services may offer propositions from more than one outcome area, but our analysis focused on their primary offering.

We identified whether the provider was offering services direct to the end user or enabling others to bring services to market and categorized accordingly. Our assessment was whether the Third Party Provider (TPP) was primarily an enabler or delivering services direct to consumer, as some providers employed both models. Our focus in this Phase of the research is on regulated firms, either Account Information Service Providers (AISPs) or Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs), who are on the OBIE Directory (See the Appendix page for more detail and explanation on the scope of this analysis).

2 Collard,S & Finney, OPEN BANKING: DEVELOPING A CONSUMER EVALUATION FRAMEWORK, Feb 2020