Open Banking+Instant Payments: Go-time for Europe
June 6, 2019
June 6, 2019
In the UK, Open Banking and Instant Payments—in the form of the Faster Payments Service (FPS), the national real-time payments scheme launched in 2008—are now well-established features of the banking and payments landscape.
With both schemes having reached critical mass, they’ve become a powerful and mutually supporting combination for driving payments innovation and use cases. While the use of FPS has been growing for more than a decade, it saw a renewed surge following the launch of Open Banking in 2018.
The result? Open Banking and Instant Payments are growing together in the UK—with banks and non-bank players increasingly looking to offer solutions that bring their customers the best of both schemes.
To thrive in this new environment, banks will also need to do something else: reposition themselves to ride out disruption.
As well as making the UK a global payments leader, the combination of FPS and Open Banking has made it the world’s most disrupted financial services market—with a host of innovative fintechs seizing market share that the banks traditionally held.
As Instant Payments and Open Banking gain scale and momentum in Europe, the European financial services market is heading for similar disruption. And to ensure they’ll be disruptors rather than disrupted, banks must act now.
For Europe’s incumbent banks, the question is: how far will the disruption from Open Banking and Instant Payments go—and how can they make the most of it? As they wrestle with this conundrum, they face five strategic options for the roles they could adopt in this new world:
As Europe’s banks weigh up these options, the competitive threat from the global tech giants is growing by the day. So, there’s no time to lose. The message is clear: Act now—before it’s too late. Contact us to see how we can help.
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