Collaboration and Culture: The Keys to Success in U.S. Open Banking

The U.S.’ new Open Banking rules are an exciting development for the world’s largest market for financial services, but there’s a strong argument that it also has profound global implications.

This has two parts. Firstly, as a catalyst to drive companies outside of the U.S. to launch in America. Secondly, to activate a more ‘globalised’ Open Banking ecosystem for large banks and fintechs driven by international collaboration.

The U.S. market scale dovetailing with the expertise of existing open banking regimes in the UK, EU, Australia, Brazil and many more places is likely to be the longer-term story. With this in mind, this next chapter explores how best to approach international collaboration.

In his seminal work When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures, Richard Lewis has some pertinent guidance to help companies navigate cultural differences in business and communication. He advises leaders when approaching doing business in America to place close attention to specific local knowledge.

“It is advisable to have on your team someone who knows their country [the U.S.] well.”

While this applies when dealing with any nationality, Lewis notes the particular importance of communication and language, especially for non-U.S. English speakers.

A common mistake, he says, is in “often assuming that Americans are similar because they speak the same tongue. Americans live in a different hemisphere and a different world. They do things their way and people who have lived in the U.S. know the shortcuts in doing business with them.”

Communicating Effectively In International Business

Whether it was Sir Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw who warned us that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language,” the clear message is in reminding us that international communication can break down even if we share a language.

These communication missteps can occur due to vocabulary being used differently (well-known examples include chips, pants, biscuits, smart), or differences in behaviour such as greetings, meetings etiquette, dress-code, gift-giving, contract negotiation, etc.

In international business, significant productivity gains can be achieved if your team understands the nuances of communicating in English internationally and pays attention to both linguistic and cultural differences.

Even though English still pervades as the most common language used for international business, the reality is that most international business environments are multilingual, multinational, and multicultural. A typical senior business person that you might meet in the U.S. may not be American, may speak multiple languages, may have worked in many different countries and will have acquired a range of different approaches to communicating successfully internationally.

Their own team will be made up of people similar to them in terms of experience. Every day they will be navigating linguistic and cultural differences, but they will be so good at it, it will be almost unconscious.

So, what do these great communicators do, and what can we learn from them? From my research, I discovered that in some ways it wasn’t very complicated, but it did take effort, patience, and great observational skills. There are 5 key elements to great international communication:

           ⭐️ Linguistic collaboration

           ⭐️ Inclusive mindset

           ⭐️ Meta-Level thinking

           ⭐️ Empathy

           ⭐️ Intercultural collaboration

Briefly, these can be described as follows:

• Linguistic collaboration is about making yourself understandable. This might include using less jargon, plain language, fewer idioms, fewer phrasal verbs, fewer wise-cracks; essentially ‘cleaning up’ your language so a wider range of linguistic backgrounds can understand you more readily.
• Having an inclusive mindset, in this context, builds on the above, and encourages the international communicator to engage in productive and useful behaviours such as great meeting etiquette, turn-taking on video calls, allowing time for clarification and meaning checking, and addressing unequal power dynamics due to language fluency.
• When we engage in meta-level thinking in international communication, we are seriously dialling up our observational skills and noticing when communication is failing, and making decisions about what steps to take to put it right.

Part of that might be noticing that those who are not speaking their first language may be finding the communication stressful, tiring, or confusing, and this requires empathy on our part. This empathy for others in international communication needs to include an awareness of potential negative emotions attached to speaking a language that isn’t your first language. That power can inadvertently lie with those whose language is more proficient, not necessarily those who are the most competent at their jobs.

Lastly, inter-cultural collaboration includes the delicate balance of ensuring you know enough about the countries you are visiting on business to avoid any faux-pas or blunders, but at the same time appreciating that sometimes company/organisation culture can trump national culture in terms of guidance regarding “how we do things around here.” Blunders and faux-pas can be avoided, but research in advance matters such as punctuality, handshakes (or not), eating and eating utensils, business cards, dress code, meeting format, and navigating organisational hierarchies.

However, it is also essential to understand the culture of the organisation and the personalities of your colleagues and counterparts to know how decisions are likely to be made, how negotiations may unfold, how projects are managed, how presentations are best received, how relationships are formed, how formal or informal communications play out, how rules and procedures are followed, how ideas are best brought forward, in fact, how best to play your hand at every moment in the business relationship.

Above all else, self-awareness is key. Knowing who you are, how you are coming across, and what impact you are having on others in international business is essential to your success.

Extract taken from Chapter 8 of the Transatlantic Index USA. Download the report in full: https://www.openbankingexcellence.org/transatlantic-index/

The Open Banking opportunity is super-sized in the US.

What’s the market size and how do we best access it?  What are the gotcha’s? What do we need to know…? 

 To answer these questions and many more we’ve had from our global community we’re sharing our latest report with Oxford University in digestible bite sized chunks.

The U.S. is the largest market for financial services in the world and the U.S. Open Banking market currently stands at $7.08bn with projected growth to $35.79bn by 2031. Fintechs in the U.S. scooped up 45.6 per cent of the global share of fintech investment in the first half of 2024.