Highlights from the first event on open banking by Salt Edge & W.UP

In short about Open Banking Reality: Beyond the Noise event – in a relaxed atmosphere with a glass of wine, a bunch of pioneers in open banking and like-minded people having insightful discussions about their shared interest in digital transformation.

What do Oval Money, Fincog, W.UP, Revolut, and Salt Edge have in common? These companies are open banking first-movers, willing to face its challenges and benefit from its ideas, as well as to share their experiences at the stage of Open Banking Reality: Beyond the Noise, an event, powered by Salt Edge and W.UP, about the real life open banking cases that took place on 10 December in London.

You never get far on your own, so growing fast and steady, we felt like it was time to share Salt Edge’s experience in the field of open banking with other like-minded people, asking some of them to do the same. This is how the event Open Banking Reality: Beyond the Noise was born.

And while for some financial institutions open banking seems to be a compliance burden, for others it’s a digital transformation opportunity. So, we invited to a frank discussion representatives of different successful businesses to deep-dive into the diverse open banking reality. 

Benedetta Arese Lucini, CEO at Oval Money, kicked off by stating that “it’s easier to divorce than to change your bank account”. She emphasized that 80% of millennials in the UK delay important financial decisions due to difficulty in understanding banking products and services. Thus, one of the key elements behind Oval is the idea of being a platform aggregator that can integrate multiple useful services for the user and together win the competition around customer trust. This is valuable for both Oval users, who can benefit from new services in one place, and Oval partners, which get new customers – and this is the ultimate blessing of open banking when all the market participants including end-users benefit in the equation.

Lisa Gutu, Head of Development at Salt Edge, shared takeaways from the company’s experience of integrating 600+ PSD2 APIs around Europe. The top 4 countries with the best API quality based on availability are the UK (96%), Netherlands (83%), Portugal (80%), Czech Republic (76%). Taking into consideration several factors like the ease of integration, the possibility to test various scenarios, and overall compliance with the RTS requirements, we divided the integrated bank APIs in 3 groups: 

The main factors describing a successful bank’s API implementation are clear and complete documentation, seamless AISP & PISP flows, support of dynamic TPP registration, and fast communication & support from the bank.

Revolut’s Director, Global Marketing & Communications – Chad West – stated that compared by other neobanks, Revolut actually makes money. He delivered an energetic and passionate speech about their open banking goals of becoming one place for all their customers’ accounts, balances, and transactions. Eventually facilitating better credit, interest rates, and finances in one app.

Remco Veenenberg, Head of Alliances at W.UP listed the top 5 reasons for switching to digital-only banks being: 

• 33% “Doing all my banking online is more convenient
• 31% “I will get better rates”
• 28% “I want to transfer money more easily”
• 22% “I want free transactions abroad”
• 22% “I like to receive real-time notifications on my spending”

Jeroen de Bel, the Founder of Finecog – a consulting company specialized in FinTech, has shared interesting stats that show a steady rise of fintech challenger banks:

“This was a great evening with varied and interesting data points raised by all the presenters. We had a wide range of attendees from Fintechs, banks, and industry leading consultancy firms. This generated interesting discussions long after the speakers stopped. Bottom line, open banking is getting there but more work needs to be done. Looking forward to arranging many other events of this type soon,” said Jason O’Shaughnessy, SVP of Sales at Salt Edge.

It was just the first of many open banking events to come. We aim to create a community of open banking enthusiasts that are bold and can be a little more ‘open’ by sharing their market ideas, struggles they might be facing, and the amazing new opportunities that are forged in the process.

About Salt Edge 

Salt Edge – a financial API platform with PSD2 and open banking solutions. The company has two main vectors of activity: enabling third parties to get access to bank channels via a unified gateway, and developing the technology necessary for banks to become compliant with the directive’s requirements. ISO 27001 certified and AISP licensed under PSD2, the company employs the highest international security measures to ensure stable and reliable connections between financial institutions and their customers. The company is integrated with 3700+ financial institutions in 70+ countries.

More information: www.saltedge.com

Phone number: +1-437-886-3969

E-mail: press@saltedge.com