Smart Data in practice: Open Banking

Smart Data is already powering British banking innovation through Open Banking, the live example of a Smart Data scheme in the UK. We believe it has the potential to drive innovation across many more sectors.

In 2017, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) mandated the UK’s nine largest banks to facilitate the sharing of customer data, specifically bank current account and credit card data.

  • Over 0 million

    new users have engaged with Open Banking as of February 2023.

  • More than 0 million

    open banking payments were made as of July 2023.

Building on Open Banking, authorised third parties now offer a range of innovative services to consumers and small businesses, including: 

  • “Round up” card payments to encourage regular saving habits
  • Payment cards that give holidaymakers access to improved exchange rates without international transaction fees
  • Cloud accounting services that help businesses manage their cashflow and taxes
  • Smarter credit checks that give freelancers and small businesses with variable incomes access to loans and credit
  • The ability to display data from all of the customer’s accounts on one dashboard to enable holistic money management, and 
  • Apps that analyse spending data to identify opportunities for cost savings, such as cancelling a subscription.

This approach to supporting innovation in financial services has helped establish the UK as an international leader in the development of financial technology (fintech). UK fintech start-ups have attracted significant investment with many scaling in size, disrupting and diversifying banking services available to consumers and small businesses. The UK is second only to the US as a top destination for fintech investment.

 

The Open Up Challenges

Open Up 2018 was a £5 million challenge prize supported by the CMA and funded by HSBC, Lloyds, RBS, Santander and Barclays. It incentivised innovative open banking solutions to benefit small businesses. Winners included:

  • Funding Options – Europe’s leading marketplace for business finance, each year raining £100 million+ in vital finance for thousands of UK small businesses.
  • Swoop – a one-stop money shop for businesses, simplifying and speeding up access to business loans, grants and equity finance.
  • Coconut – a tax app that helps self-employed people track income, manage invoicing, claim expenses, and work out how much to set aside for tax. 

Open Up 2020 was a £1.5 million challenge prize that incentivised innovative open banking solutions to benefit consumers. Winners included:

  • Moneybox – an innovative app that helps customers save and invest for their future. They can set money aside through round ups or regular deposits and choose from a range of savings products.
  • Plum – an AI assistant that boosts a user’s bank balance through automated savings, using open banking data to determine how much a user could set aside at the end of each week.
  • Mojo Mortgages – uses credit and open banking data to determine if a customer is mortgage ready, particularly helpful for people with variable incomes.
  • Wagestream – allows employees to stream a proportion of their income as it’s earned, save directly from their salary, track wages and get impartial, financial education in real-time.

Learn more about developing and testing Smart Data

Sign up for updates about the Challenge

Sign up for our newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.