Open banking. New opportunities for the financial market of Ukraine

Open banking. New opportunities for the financial market of Ukraine.

Open banking, which will be fully operational in Ukraine in 2025, will launch a new phase in the functioning of the financial market. Banks will open their interfaces (API) and allow third-party companies to acquire customer data, using them, to create new innovative services.

In order to make open banking work not only on paper, it is significant to formulate rules for its regulation and set specific standards. It is a complex ecosystem that provides many scenarios for interaction between participants and additionally has to take into consideration the interests of each of them. With the aim of developing the standards of open banking in the Ukrainian market, several initiative groups have already been created, uniting representatives of banks, fintech, payment systems, and providers, etc. One of the mentioned is Open APi Group, which has united around this idea more than 40 companies, including banks, non-bank financial companies, payment providers and systems, IT companies, and others, as well as foreign consultants who offer expert opinion to build an effective open banking system. The initiative group is working on the development of the specification, analyses the issues of GDPR, anti-fraud, and Use Cases in which open banking could be used in terms of specific needs of the market and consumers at all. Contrary to the European market, where the launch of open banking took place completely from the ground up, Ukraine already has such possibility to take into account the experience and following conclusions of other countries (thus avoiding a number of mistakes). That is why the members of the Open API Group carefully analyse the OBIE UK model and the Berlin Group model in order to learn successful lessons from best practices worldwide. 

It is expected that the "sandbox" of the National Bank of Ukraine, which will permit trying out innovative financial products, will begin operating in August 2022 and it will be possible to try some open banking scenario in practice using this platform.

The Ukrainian financial and payment market is quite advanced, and consumers are quite exacting, as they have long been accustomed to assorted innovations. That is why the development of standards and rules of Open banking is an ambitious goal that also has to consider, among other things, market trends and create only those services that will be in demand, based on customer and business requirements.