While everybody talks about the #openbanking ecosystem, there is limited understanding of the relationships and the interdependencies behind the scenes driving things forward. Let’s take a look.

The Open Banking value proposition consists of 4 main elements:

— open APIs acting as the connecting rails

— #data as the overarching element

— an open, cloud-based landscape consisting of closely intertwined services running across marketplaces, platforms and ecosystems

— a shift from vertical silos and legacy infrastructure to an open set-up

Open Banking’s predecessor – before modern APIs became ubiquitous – is the so-called screen scraping, which refers to a customer sharing login details with a third party, which, in turn, “scrapes” the data to get access to the account. Germany’s Sofort, later acquired by Klarna, became successful on the back of this business model, which is now antiquated due to security and data privacy issues.

Initial Open Banking use cases span from single, global account aggregation & visualization to automatic verification & identification, to access to account balances when performing a lending risk assessment or to analytics insights and recommendations for wealth management.

What is common across all these initial use cases is that they evolve around the account, whereas the next phase of the journey – known under the term open #finance – is driving contextual, predictive, and hyper-personalized experiences across the board (i.e. savings, lending, investments, insurance). A closer look at the rise of open finance around the globe reveals two main patterns:

— More ownership and control over data

— Establishment of a remuneration model, mostly missing under the previous set-up

It becomes evident that despite its name – derived from the opening up of information held by banks to third parties – Open Banking goes, in reality, far beyond banking and is gradually becoming the main enabler of the two (most) dominant business models of our time:

— Platform economics

— Embedded finance

Which is the key reason why it fundamentally changes not only the structure of the financial services’ value chain, but also its breadth and reach by means of:

1) involving a plethora of new actors (from governments and regulators to API standardization bodies and industry associations)

2) forcing old ones (i.e. banks) to radically reposition themselves

Going forward there is one thing that cannot go unnoticed: whereas most of the modern #fintech innovation was built on existing infrastructure (i.e. #banking, cards) – having benefited from the decoupling of the front-end from legacy systems – Open Banking and its more mature sibling are powering for the first time in a long period the build-up of an additional infrastructure layer that is quickly becoming the foundation of the digital revolution globally.

Opinions: Panagiotis Kriaris LinkedIn's Post, Graphic source: Platformable