The Open Banking Journey

Banks are confronted with an increasingly dynamic market, with new competition in the form of start-ups that are largely unburdened by years of technical debt. Fintech and tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google now offer banking services, innovating at scale at a fast pace. This change in the market is encouraged by regulations explicitly designed to generate competition by driving banks to open their data and services to third parties, including consumers.

To compete with disruptors and continue growing the business, banks should reinvent the way they interact with consumers, creating new, innovative and convenient services in a similar way as fintech and tech companies are doing.

In this context, Payments Services Directive 2 (PSD2) OpenBanking can be an opportunity to modernize the technology platforms that enable innovation. Regulators enforce banks to provide easy access to data and payments services to third parties on customers’ behalf. However, banks should investigate capitalizing on PSD2 OpenBanking and creating new services and products that will position them as a modern everyday bank. Accenture summarizes the strategy spectrum as going from ‘Comply Only’ where there is a risk of up to 30% revenue loss all the way to an ‘Everyday Bank’ positioning with a potential for up to 20% revenue uplift. (see Figure 1)

Figure 1 – Strategies spectrum for capitalizing on PSD2 OpenBanking technology investment

For banks to position in the ‘Access Facilitator’ or ‘Value Aggregator’ spectrum, there are a few technology capabilities that must be in place, including:

• Controlled openness so that the bank and clients know and control who accesses what data and when.
• The ability to create new services quickly based on market demand.
• Consolidated, consistent and controlled security as well as access, including identity management.
• A flexible approach to integration that supports all modern integration patterns and protocols while allowing effective integration with legacy systems, without becoming a central bottleneck.
• On-demand scalability to cover application request peaks.
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and automatable lifecycle management.
• System-wide business monitoring, reporting and alerting.

Accenture and Red Hat have teamed up to define a capabilities reference architecture for PSD2 OpenBanking and what enterprise grade open source platforms could fulfil those capabilities as visible in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Reference capabilities architecture for PSD2 OpenBanking

The overlay of technology platforms against the capabilities does not intend to be prescriptive, rather trigger ideas around technology capabilities that will enable innovation and what enterprise open source solutions to consider within the Red Hat portfolio.

If you are interested in learning more, it is worth having a look at our joint paper. In addition, join me at RedHat Summit 2019 this May in Boston, where I will be sharing more on OpenBanking. Hope to see you there!