UK open banking maintains momentum as active users hit six million

In the UK bank, there are currently over six million active open banking customers, with data indicating that adoption has maintained the pace set earlier this year.

Since the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) last disclosed numbers in January, there have been an extra one million open banking customers.

It took four months to get from four million to five million open banking users, then another four months to get to six million. While the rate of adoption has slowed, it’s still a huge improvement over the ten months it took to go from one million to two million open banking customers.

Since the implementation of the Open Banking directive, also known as PSD2, in January 2018, the UK’s largest banks have been required to make their data public in a more uniform format.

Third-party developers have been able to use open APIs to create financial services-related applications, such as a chatbot that tracks a customer’s spending at a different institution.

account-to-account payments have also been enabled, removing the requirement for third-party intermediaries.

According to the OBIE, which develops software standards and industry norms for UK retail banking, there were a record one billion API requests last month – a critical statistic for gauging industry activity.

According to the most recent data, businesses and consumers used open banks technologies to make five million payments in May 2022, up from roughly four million in January.

“Once again, this demonstrates that consumers and small businesses are reaping the benefits of using open banks to keep track of spending and daily budgeting, reduce card-processing costs, and shop around for better financial products and services,” said David Beardmore, the OBIE’s ecosystem development director.

Open banking is a boon for the fintech industry in the United Kingdom.

The Competition and Markets Authority originally announced open banking in 2017 in order to boost banking innovation and break the stronghold that the UK’s nine largest banks had on financial data.

While some in the industry believe that open banking had a rocky start, others see it as a driver for a surge of fintech firms that have developed new businesses using open financial APIs.

Fintech has risen to become the UK’s most prominent technological sector, receiving $11.6 billion in funding and outperforming the rest of Europe by 2021.

“This is excellent news for the entire open banking community,” Maria Palmieri, director of public policy at Yapily, an open banks infrastructure business, stated. “The open banking revolution will change how people and corporations handle and control their money.”

“We look forward to working with the OBIE and the government to preserve this momentum and boost additional adoption, including the development of a forward-looking open financial framework and a clear governance structure for future regulation,” Palmieri said.