India achieves the highest score for collaboration in the Open Finance Index survey:
India achieved the highest score for collaboration in The Open Finance Index survey, conducted as a joint research project by Open Banking Excellence and the University of Oxford. India was followed by the Netherlands and Germany. The study said India’s open banking regime will soon cover more than a billion accounts.
The joint research project was sponsored by Accenture and NatWest and has been facilitated by a wider network of partners, including the DIT, Innovate Finance and the World Bank.
The study also brought out the fact that the UK, currently considered the global leader in open banking, will lose its leadership position unless drastic action is taken.
The Global Open Finance Index is a report based on in-depth and data-driven study of the global state of open banking and offers insights from more than 400 open banking and open finance experts from 23 countries.
Helen Child, CEO & Founder of Open Banking Excellence, said India’s roll-out has created a group of more than a billion accounts accessible in the same standard. She said members of the OBE community in Brazil reached 5 million connected accounts in one fifth of the time it took the UK; and Australia is already forging ahead with open energy.
EXPORT OPPORTUNITY
She said the open banking space represents a huge export opportunity for UK firms and the UK tech companies have the knowledge and experience to support countries across the world to positively impact their economy, society and environment, whilst at the same time address an export-led market that has been estimated to be worth up to $416 billion per year by the end of the decade. “That position is now at risk, due to a stagnant situation at home combined with enormous acceleration in the pace of global competition,” she added.
The study covered 23 countries and analyzed more than 150 aspects to identify the component parts of a successful open banking ecosystem. It stressed that the UK was still seen as a global leader, but countries like Brazil, Singapore, India and Australia were moving faster and are likely to eclipse the UK in the near future.
It said in the UK, NatWest has played a leading role in open banking systems creating the ‘Bank of APIs’ – an application programming ecosystem that goes beyond the UK open banking mandate and is bringing an increasingly wide variety of the bank’s services to customers and partners in new and convenient ways.
OPEN FINANCE, THE NEXT STEP
The study said open finance, described as the next step beyond open banking, enabling access and sharing of consumer data to even more financial products and services -not just banking, will be an enabler of financial inclusion and has the potential to contribute toward ESG goals such as net zero.
The Open Finance Index found that countries with the lowest levels of financial inclusion all reported adoption of lending use cases in the account verification and income and affordability assessment categories. In the 23 countries that were covered, the unbanked population is nearly 400,000,000 people.
While open finance has been widely adopted in Europe and Australia, North America has its own perspective and regulations for what consumer-permissioned data sharing looks like in the future.
FOCUS ON APAC REGION
The study focused on 3 countries in the APAC region – Australia, India and Singapore. It said Australia’s hugely ambitious legislative approach via the Consumer Data Right, or CDR, stands in stark contrast to the ‘government supported’ approach of other key markets in the region. Whilst the difference in approach may be clear, its impact is less so given the equally ambitious support, primarily through the creation of digital public infrastructure in Singapore and India.
The study specifically mentioned about India’s successful roll-out of the account aggregator platform, which has created what is arguably the world’s largest open banking ecosystem with more than 1 billion accounts now accessible. It also said Singapore may be a small market but its pan-ASEAN approach is clearly positioning it well as a fintech hub for the region with fintech investment running at around 0.6% of GDP (vs 0.2% for India and 0.05% for Australia).
