Open banking can be fun
The EU and the UK have achieved a tremendous feat - they've established a framework for 'open banking'. This framework requires banks to create free data-sharing APIs and maintain them at their own cost. There is a steady upward trend of open banking being adopted in more places across different industries. But because open banking is driven by regulation, it's not what you would immediately associate with “fun”. Yet for it to make it go mainstream, open banking has to be fun.
To get a feel for what fun looks like, we can look at crypto. What started as a bunch of 'white papers' and math wizards crunching complex algorithms, is now a movement led by builders, developers and creators that see crypto as a playground for trying out new things, building toys and every now and then solving expensive real world problems. For example, the invention of NFTs has made crypto attractive to artists, musicians and creative geniuses, which in turn have attracted more people to crypto.
Open banking has what crypto does not have - the full support from the regulators and corporations. It has the safety rails needed for mainstream adoption. Crypto might not yet have the same level of support from the traditional authorities, but it can teach open banking the importance of building a community that celebrates play - when you have a community of believers, builders and visionaries that riff on each other's ideas and they have a place to try new things out, this is where innovation happens.
Once open banking goes mainstream, the fun will begin
What we have today with open banking is a technology that's almost exclusively available to large corporations. This is nothing unusual, as some of those corporations were the ones building the actual infrastructure. But to push open banking into the mainstream, we need to make freely open banking accessible for tinkerers that see it as a playground for building new and creative things. People are wired in a way that we need to play to be able to invent - open banking needs this.
To give another example, when Google opened up its doors to developers for their mobile operative system Android and provided all the needed documentation for developers to let their creativity run wild, the result was a gigantic boom in the mobile industry. We now can do things with our smartphones that were unthinkable 10 years ago.
Open banking can be used in ways that no one could predict before, such as bringing peoples’ finances to the places they use the most, like integrating it with virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri. Today, we have to rely on the big banks to launch better ways for us to manage and control our money. When open banking goes mainstream, we will no longer have to rely on banks - we will have third party apps where you can create your own personal finance app with a drag'n'drop interface like Wix, and much more.
Open banking is a force of good change in the industry, and it's important for it to have a serious side to guarantee privacy, security and reliability of the infrastructure. But a city without a park or a playground sounds dull and innovation needs its playgrounds.
Rolands Mesters, CEO and Co-founder of Nordigen
