The events of the last year have changed so many things about our society that the picture for the rest of this year is far from clear. One thing that is clear however is this. Our relationship with our money - and those who manage it on our behalf - will never go back to how it was. We’ve seen a decade’s worth of adoption of new technologies crammed into a year, driven by newly formed groups of people with sudden and acute needs and we’ve seen people forced to change lifelong habits by being distanced from their bank branches.
Open Banking and the transaction dataset that it unlocks, present solutions tailor-made to address the problems faced by these groups and in this year’s Beyond Open Banking report, we explore the hows and whys of that solution.
Just as in previous years, our aim is to understand more about the kind of financial experiences people are looking for and how Open Banking pioneers are gearing up to provide that. In this year’s study, however, we’re able to overlay the effect of the COVID pandemic, understand its impact on the financial sector and outline how an open ecosystem can be applied to solving some of the problems created.
We look at the 6 million new savers who have saved £125bn more in 2020 than they did in the year before - young, affluent members of the knowledge economy with resilient employment and above average levels of tech adoption. They’re smart but financially apathetic and need help as they build for the future.
On the other side of the savings gap, there are those who have suffered a life-changing economic shock. They are predominantly on low or irregular incomes and are in material danger of being excluded from the financial system. They want help with budgeting and money-saving tools and they want to find ways of having their real-life affordability reflected in the way the credit system treats them.
Perhaps the most important section of the Beyond Open Banking report covers what looks increasingly like a credit system with a crisis of transparency. COVID relief payment holidays have added another layer of opacity to a system that was already struggling to cope with the speed of change in the sector. If nothing else - addressing this has to be a strategic imperative for Open Banking this year.
There’s more in the data than we could cover in the report and far more in the report than we can cover here so grab your copy of part 1 below. In a couple of weeks we’ll be releasing part 2, in which we’ll look at the results from a survey of 300 digital FS leaders. We quizzed our panel on what they’d done with open banking so far, how they’d gone about it, what had worked and what hadn’t. In doing so, we’ve got the closest thing yet to a roadmap for success in 2021… but more on that soon.
In the meantime, your customers’ needs are changing and open banking can help you address that - find out how in part 1.
Download the report
