Open Banking’s success will be confirmed when it is longer talked about, according to Dan Globerson, head of open banking at NatWest.
Speaking on the ‘How open is Open Banking?’ panel on the first day of EBAday 2020, Globerson states that Open Banking needs to reach a point where it is just accepted as a conventional way of consumers, corporates and banks managing accounts and making payments.
“Banking itself is a rather simple activity - it's money going in and money going out,” Globerson says.
“If you look at how we’re trying to facilitate this with Open Banking and PSD2, they’ve been landing really well. It’s just a case of the systems maturing and availability expanding - even if availability is at 99%, that final 1% could be where it’s really needed.”
Globerson and his fellow panelists agree that the potentials of Open Banking will be better realised when products and services are developed in the corporate banking sphere, as well as in retail banking.
Mario Benedict, head of APIs and digital product solutions at JPMorgan, says: “We’re looking at how Open Banking can help with our corporate clients’ pain points.
“So, we’re looking at integration with existing payment rails infrastructure to create holistic payments and reporting service for clients with real-time data, to help them manage their mandates and get the information they require faster.”
Globerson agrees that corporate banking has been “under invested and under discussed” in the Open Banking conversation, to the detriment of the whole ecosystem.
“If we can create products and services that are competitive and effective for companies as well as consumers, it will help drive competition, compress margins and disintermediate the whole space,” he says.
This would be where Open Banking would enable financial institutions to transcend their traditional roles in their customers’ and clients’ worlds and become “ecosystem enablers”, as Pelin Dumans, product owner at ABN AMRO, puts it.
“It won’t be just about creating APIs and putting them out to market,” she says.
“We’ll be able engage with more third parties and create more partnerships, from which everyone will benefit: customers, banks, vendors, consultancies and so on.”
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