Open Banking proved that when people gain secure access to their financial data, innovation follows. Faster credit decisions, personalised money management
tools, and more informed financial choices all stemmed from a simple shift: data becoming portable.
Open Finance takes that principle further. It extends secure data sharing across savings, mortgages, pensions, insurance, investments and beyond. The potential
is significant, but so is the complexity. Recent discussions led by the FCA demonstrate that Open Finance will only deliver on its promise if it is built on reliable, standardised and trusted data foundations.
The case for Open Finance
For individuals, Open Finance could mean a unified, real-time picture of financial life, including daily spending, savings, retirement planning, and credit
commitments brought together in one view.
For firms, the implications are equally meaningful. Greater visibility enables lenders to make more accurate affordability assessments, utilities and local
authorities to identify struggling households earlier, and insurers and asset managers to design products aligned to real-world financial behaviours. In short, Open Finance creates the infrastructure for a more adaptive financial system.
Momentum is building. The FCA’s partnership with Raidiam to deliver the
Smart Data Accelerator marks a decisive move from concept to implementation.
Marie Walker, Open Futurist at Raidiam, notes:
“The recent partnership between the FCA and Raidiam for the Smart Data Accelerator programme demonstrates how critical collaborative testing is to realising this potential.”
She adds:
“Through industry sprints and sandbox environments, we’re creating safe spaces to rigorously test product ideation, governance frameworks, and technical standards before they go live.”
Two new TechSprints—focused on mortgages and SME finance—will run later this year, further expanding live testing of cross-sector data sharing.
The FCA’s recent Open Finance Sprint identified four areas where this shift could have the most impact:
Ambition is high. The challenge now is ensuring the infrastructure can support it.
The challenge: usable, portable, trusted data
If Open Finance simply layers new datasets onto today’s fragmented environment, progress will stall. Trust, interoperability and data quality are the three
structural dependencies that determine whether Open Finance becomes a coherent ecosystem—or a disconnected set of pilots.
Trust is non-negotiable. Consumers will only share data if they believe
it is secure, fairly used, and delivers clear value. Interoperability matters because data must move easily
between banks, insurers, pension providers, utilities, fintechs, and emerging Smart Data services. And
data quality—accurate, timely, standardised—will determine whether innovations are safe, scalable, and regulatory-ready.
The FCA’s Sprint framed these requirements through five pillars:
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Adaptive, collaborative regulation
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Robust privacy and security protections
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Interoperability and cross-sector collaboration
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Financial capability and empowerment
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Real-time insights and proactive services
Supporting these are three enablers: modern technical infrastructure, sustained consumer trust, and industry-wide coordination.
As Walker notes:
“This ensures that smart data solutions deliver real benefits—fairer access to services, genuine competition based on quality rather than data lock-in, and stronger protections for vulnerable consumers.”
“By getting governance and interoperability right from the start through collective experimentation, we can accelerate innovation that truly serves UK consumers and businesses, moving smart data
from promising policy to trusted practice.”
Lessons from Open Banking
The UK’s Open Banking experience offers a clear roadmap:
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Standards matter.
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Governance matters.
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Phasing matters.
Financial APIs only gained adoption once industry and regulators aligned on specifications, oversight, security, and liability frameworks. Open Finance
spans far more sectors and products, meaning coordination requirements increase in both depth and breadth.
Many industry participants support phased expansion—beginning with savings accounts, ISAs, and lending products before progressing to pensions, insurance,
and investments. The pensions dashboards programme, while challenging, shows the long-term value of multi-party data integration when done correctly.
Regulatory sandboxes and controlled testing environments will continue to be key mechanisms for validating assumptions early and reducing the risk of systemic
issues later.
The role of trusted intermediaries
Although Open Finance is broader than the credit ecosystem, regulated credit reference agencies (CRAs) sit at a strategically important intersection: real-time
financial data, consumer protection, resilience indicators, and identity-related insights. Regulated CRAs already manage permissions-based financial information and supply standardised datasets for affordability, vulnerability detection and fraud prevention
across the economy.
In an Open Finance context, these organisations play a structural role: converting raw data into consistent, high-quality, decision-ready insight. This
function reduces fragmentation, supports interoperability, and strengthens the reliability of the ecosystem’s underlying data flows.
The lesson from Open Banking is clear:
ecosystems only scale when shared data is trusted, consistent, and governed.
