£1 Million for Inspirations on New Products and Services Using Open Banking APIs
In a concerted effort to encourage small businesses to compete in the digital economy, in February this year UK innovation foundation Nesta announced its Open Up Challenge. This challenge sought to encourage Fintech firms to explore the opportunities provided by Open Banking APIs. The impending initiation of Open Banking APIs holds the potential to transform the way people discover, access and use financial services. 20 teams participated in the first phase, each receiving a £50,000 development grant and exclusive access to the Open Up Data Sandbox. This contains millions of anonymised transaction data sets that conform with the recent release of UK government-approved API specifications for account and transaction information and payments initiation, which will go live in January 2018.
The potential for Open Banking APIs to change the way that we interact with banks seems to be enormous. It’s Amazon-style recommendations but with users controlling who gets access to their data. If account holders can authorise financial services competitors to analyse their data in order to offer new or alternative services, the shape of many aspects of banking will change significantly.
Read more here. Interesting model, yes?
