I am on the members’ governance committee for my workplace pension scheme. A provider is telling us their app supports OpenFInance, which is like OpenBanking, but includes things like savings-only providers, mortgages etc.
Do you have any plans to implement that?
Hi @ricochet the concept of ‘Open Finance’ has been around for a while, but the actual government Bill to make some of these concepts a reality was only introduced to Parliament in October. As your linked article talks about:
The Data (Use and Access) (DUA) Bill will allow the government and regulators to extend the benefits of open banking and to mandate new smart data schemes in other sectors, including energy, telecoms, pensions, retail, mortgages, transport and insurance.
So we will be certainly watching how this develops, but this a long way from being established like “Open Banking”(for current accounts, credit cards and certain Savings accounts) is in the UK.
For pensions specifically, there have been other government or industry initiatives such as the ‘Pensions Dashboard’ which I assume the provider you mention is referring to
https://www.pensionsdashboardsprogramme.org.uk/
Paul
Thanks Paul - my brain hadn’t connected the dots - I assumed the concept was sort of adopted, but the legislation was about requiring providers to supply it.
The demo we had included a mortgage and they were suggesting that they had hundreds of parties that they could add things for.
Pete
So trying out their demo site, they have the ability to link to, say, my Chelsea BS mortgage, but they do not have e.g. the Pockit prepayment debit account that I have or anything from NS&I. But then they do have Marcus accounts.
So it looks like some parties are providing this now and they are taking advantage of it.
FYI, this is Money Mindset from Standard Life.
Hi @ricochet - Money Mindset is a partnership with MoneyHub and this model has been around for a few years and before the Open Finance initiative.
MoneyHub use a combination of Open Banking connections (like Snoop and other apps) and. other APIs like those that support Pension Dashboard connections. What they have also always offered for many years is the ability to do a type of ‘screen scraping’ where you effectively provide your log on credentials to them and they log-on on to the provider on your behalf. They offer today lots of examples where this can be used including the examples you mention.
That’s not an approach we ever plan to support for a number of reasons.
Often financial service providers will stop these types of connections from working once they have been setup - NS&I is an example here, as you can see on this page here. This connection method is not officially supported by most financial providers and Open Banking was in part designed to do away with this type of approach.
The Open Finance initiative should bring in a more robust technical standard (like Open Banking has) to make these connections more reliable in future and importantly, stop you needing to share your log-on credentials with a third party.
Paul
Oh yuk! I hadn’t even thought of screen-scraping as how they are doing it - that is truly horrible. And glad to hear you are not entertaining the idea!
Are the OF proposals sufficiently well scoped that the existing APIs are going to become redundant?
Hi @ricochet - I would say there is quite a way to go before ‘new’ Open Finance APIs are available. However, the good news is that the success of Open Banking in the UK proves that it can be done well and relatively quickly once there is appropriate government and regulatory backing. If the big banks can make it work - then so can all the other providers.
Hence the recent Parliament bill is a very important step.
Paul