Open Banking PTBR

Many banks are looking to embrace the open banking opportunity The early indicators point to relatively strong take-up. In the UK, the OBIE (which oversees the domestic open banking initiative) reported that there were 80.7 million successful API calls in July 2019; an increase of 21% on the June total, and a significant uplift from the 23.1 million in January. There has also been a surge of activity in the US as well. Developments here have been more market-led, with direct connections between bank and the treasury systems in large corporates emerging as a key use case. Indeed, Citibank reported that it had processed 157 million API calls since the late 2016 launch of its CitiConnect initiative. In addition to supporting clients through a range of data driven services, over $26 billion of payments have been initiated by Citibank customers via API over this period. Open banking is leading to a form of 'API economy' The past 18 months has seen a step-change in attitudes towards open banking by financial institutions. Ovum's ICT Enterprise Insights study for 2017/18 found that 51% of banks were planning to actively encourage third party developers to consume API-delivered services in the year ahead. In our 2018/19 survey, this figure had risen to 78%, highlighting the change in mindset from open banking being a compliance exercise to becoming an entirely new way of ultimately engaging with customers. Indeed, the question facing the most forward-thinking banks in the industry is how to take advantage of the open banking opportunity. One of the more

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