BrazilBanks and new entrants step up their open banking endeavours
Banks across the world continue to invest in their open banking capabilities, both in terms of functional scope as well as in development maturity, according to Innopay’s 2022 Open Banking Monitor.
Now in its third year, the Open Banking Monitor tracks the key trends & developments in open banking – a system under which banks open up their consumer banking information and infrastructure to third parties, such as fintechs, bigtechs and specialist financial services providers.
By powering interoperability and exchange of data, open banking can drive innovation and enhanced customer experience in the banking sector.
Continuing a trend seen over the past years, Innopay’s latest benchmark concludes that open banking maturity has again been improved. “Existing players in the financial industry are stepping up their game and providing interesting open banking product propositions. Meanwhile, new banks are entering the arena,” said Mounaim Cortet, Head of DACH at Innopay.
“Both the number of APIs offered by banks as well as the variety of common banking functionalities has increased,” he said. Across the board, account information (for various account types), payment initiation (for various payment instruments) and payment management (for various user-initiated actions around the payment) remained the most popular areas for open banking use cases.
Notably, said Cortet, adoption is accelerating across transaction banking operations, including areas such as trade finance, electronic bank account management and real-time cash pooling.
From a technical and development perspective, banks have also stepped up their game vis a vis the previous edition of the benchmark. Cortet: “Banks are investing in their open banking communities, expanding their IT skillset and templates, and working on making APIs more mainstream in their development processes.”
The open banking leaders
Over 50 banks were assessed on their open banking capabilities in Innopay’s Open Banking Monitor, shedding light on the leaders – and laggards – in the landscape. Deutsche Bank, the National Bank of Greece and Nordea rank among the most advanced in terms of development capabilities, while OCBC Bank and ICICI Bank top the benchmark for the richness of functional scope offered.
Having analysed what separates the leaders from the rest, Cortet said that banks that aims to create (more) sustainable value with open banking will need to get seven key building blocks right:
“With companies increasingly embedding financial services into their offerings, financial institutions should now be deciding what role they want to play in the open banking ecosystems,” concluded Cortet.
