The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has officially confirmed the full completion of the final Roadmap for Open Banking, laying the foundations for the future development of open finance.
Completion of the project comes as the final banking providers, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland, and Allied Irish Bank, fully deliver all their Roadmap requirements, including variable recurring payments (VRPs) for sweeping.
This means that all nine banking providers mandated by the CMA under the Retail Banking Market Investigation Order have successfully completed the Roadmap and associated required functionality to offer the full suite of open banking payment and account information services.
With an expanding user base - 11.32 million users in July, a 12% uplift from the previous month - the open banking ecosystem is valued at over £4 billion. In terms of payments, 19.54 million payments were made in July, and of these, VRPs for sweeping accounted for 2.45 million - a growth of 23.9%.
The completion of the Roadmap coincides with preparations for the introduction of a new Digital Information and Smart Data Bill, which is expected to expand the eccosystem to support data sharing in energy, telecoms, transport and retail sectors.
Henk Van Hulle, CEO of OBL, comments: “The rollout of sweeping functionality across all the CMA9 is a crucial step in extending the benefits of open banking to a broader range of customers. As we look ahead, the next exciting chapter will involve exploring the potential of commercial VRPs, which have the capacity to revolutionise the way businesses manage payments.”