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Maybe it's only me but I thought FPS rails is owned by UK banks. While direct access to FPS will allow TransferWise to cut out one bank middleman, wouldn't the access fees it pays enrich the coffers of traditional banks anyway?

Agreed but, if the founding premise of Open Banking is valid, your mum and next door neighbor and the Average Joe / Jane Consumer should've been facing the pain and having the need and researching the solution for a long, long time in the past. Just that, their search would've yielded no results all these years. After the recent launch of Open Banking, their search should yield results and people should be queuing up to adopt Open Banking solutions. In other words, like a cure for cancer, there should be a long waiting list for adopters of Open Banking.

@Claire Callan:

From what I understand, the need for Open Banking was felt on the basis of the following understanding of the market: (1) There's a lot of value in customer's banking data (2) Banks are doing nothing with that data (3) Customers are deprived of all the insights they can gain from their data (4) Ergo customer's banking data should be thrown open to third-parties to mine and generate insights that are useful to customers. 

By doing #4, Open Banking should be fulfilling a long pent-up consumer demand. Ergo Consumers *should* be rushing out the door looking for Open Banking products and services. Curious to know why you believe otherwise.

Oh LOL. In marketing, it's quite common to come across big differences between what consumers say they'd do (e.g. switch account to a neobank) and what consumers actually do (e.g. stay with their traditional bank). I didn't think I'd see that disconnect on Finextra e.g. claim a story to be boring versus bestow that story with the most pageviews! 

All dressed up and... I hope somewhere to go! Sadly, I tend to believe that the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica fracas will have a dampening effect on initial uptake of Open Banking.

I'm very gung-ho about this feature. I think it was Acorn that first introduced it. As a marketing professional, I see a lot more than a feature in this - I see a promising way to change consumer behavior for the consumer's own good.

Regular PFM / MoMMA app tells consumers to avoid that $5.00 expense. Nobody likes budgeting. This approach hasn't worked. Revolut / Acorn are trying to achieve fiscal discipline in a positive way: "It's your money; spend all you want; just remember, your total outflow is more than what you spend; so be careful what you spend". I expect this approach to work much better. I remember reading that Acorn has already entered the "league table of fintechs to watch out for".

1. According to an SMF study, over 60% of people would go into a branch when making a big decision. 
2. As Jeffry Pilcher, CEO/President & Publisher of The Financial Brand, points out in Branches Refuse to Die, “While the majority of consumers prefer online or mobile banking, … a surprisingly high number of consumers still visit the branch. It might be tempting to dismiss the findings and assume these branch visits were triggered by consumers who were frustrated that they weren’t able to accomplish some financial task in digital channels. But that would be a mistake.”
3. According to McKinsey, while customers want digital, it’s not to the “exclusion of other channels, which remain critically important.”
4. JP Morgan Chase opens 400 new branches (Source: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/31568/jpmorgan-chase-to-open-400-new-branches)
5. Why Branch And Digital Channels Will Coexist Forever

Good luck shilling your product, though. 

Your original post mentioned AI technology in general. Your comment says your company makes such technology, something that I didn't notice in the original post. Correct me if I'm wrong but I see a subtle shill for your company's product to banks. Nothing wrong with that per se but just saying in the interest of clearing my confusion:) 

Now, assuming AI can find people with high propensity to buy, there's no guarantee that they'll buy online. In fact, there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary viz. customers prefer branches when it comes to buying financial products. Wonder how that affects the ROI of AI investment even if it delivers 13X lift in conversion.

If budget / funding is a barrier against the use of AI by smaller companies, whose problem is that? In what way are digital advertising agencies - the brunt of your post's attack - responsible for that?

Higher bid does mean said ad channel is delivering on *some* metric that the advertiser finds important e.g. CPA, ROAS, or whatever - they're not daft to keep spending more and more money just because somebody keeps bidding up the keywords.

What's stopping you from using AI to get 13X higher conversion?

As the owner of a digital marketing agency, I think your post is overly harsh, but I'll take it as genuine feedback if you've taken the following realities into account:

1. Some of the costliest keywords in Google AdWords are for finserv products like loan, mortgage, credit card, insurance, etc. If this has been the case for only a year or two, I wouldn't make much of it. But it's been like this for several years. I strongly doubt if finserv industry would be bidding up the cost of digital ads if they didn't work for their products.
2. Large advertisers like P&G have found that, beyond a certain extent, targeting is not cost-effective. Even without bringing up the quasi-ethical issues of over-targeting, key is to strike the right balance between mass targeting & precise targeting. "Buying ads for a narrow set of precisely targeted customers is more expensive, and P&G found it was getting the same results from mass ad buys." (Source: https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-shutdown-third-party-data-affects-brands/)
3. AI of the nature you've described is already available for digital advertising. Finextra rules forbid providing product recommendations but I'll be happy to tell you more if you contact me separately.