Open Banking is no longer just about potential. There is value to be unlocked for businesses and customers alike – and success is pinned on how we can transform the customer experience.
To explore how we might engage and empower customers to choose and to use Open Banking, we assembled a varied panel of experts from Open Banking Expo’s Head of Content Ellie Duncan and Kieran Hines, Principal Analyst from Celent, to customer representatives from the likes of JS Group and NewDay. We shared some of the big lessons we’ve learned from launching and growing Payit™ by Natwest, and lifted the lid on driving adoption and behavioural change.
Through anecdotes, expertise and audience questions, attendees heard the story of Payit™ from its inception to today’s evolution and explored how to put customers at the heart of payment solutions.
The highlights from the day reveal some powerful ways that businesses, banks and payment providers can drive this shift, together.
The Open Banking story
The evolution of Open Banking is a story of an obstacle turned into an opportunity. Lynsey Hunt, Head of Payit™ Products, spoke about the conditions that led to the creation of solutions like Payit in her keynote speech.
Driven by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the creation of Open Banking APIs were mandated to open up competition and address the feeling that banks held a monopoly on customer data.
“We could have just done the minimum to meet these regulation standards,” Lynsey said. “But actually, we thought - we’ve got a really good idea. This could be really innovative and drive some great experiences for our customers.”
That thinking is at the core of making Open Banking work: putting customers first.
The most successful payment solutions are developed with the customer at their heart, and at Payit™ we achieved this by leveraging our unique position between bank and fintech. Combining the security, resilience, scale and trust of a bank with the customer focus, value creation and agility that you would normally associate with a fintech allows us to deliver a service that feels both mature and innovative – a far cry from the early days of the mandate.
This reassures consumers of their concerns around safety, security, and ease. At the heart of reluctance to embrace Open Banking is a lack of trust in the sharing of personal data, and a lack of education about what third party providers really do with that data.
But Open Banking doesn’t have to be complicated – it does what it says on the tin. It's about opening up the banks and allowing for the safe and secure transfer of customer data across third parties.
The key, we’ve learned, is to reassure consumers that their data is being put in the hands of an organisation they can trust, and that it will be dealt with smoothly and securely. Our long-standing experience of managing customer data -is critically important. That’s how our customers trust that Payit™ has the infrastructure to remain secure and compliant with data, even at scale.
By being uniquely placed in the heart of the banking ecosystem, we have a unique perspective. We don’t just tell other banks to initiate payments on behalf of customers. We are part of the payment system itself.
Building this trust is making the crucial difference to the widespread adoption of Open Banking across the UK, and we’re excited to see just how this journey develops.
Lessons from the field
Attendees on the day also discussed the opportunities and challenges they were facing when it came to the implementation of Open Banking solutions. What was clear was the sheer diversity of applications - from student finance support to innovative loan applications.
A representative from a London borough explained how QR codes were integral to making Open Banking more accessible for the borough’s residents. “We’ve got to try and make it as simple as possible for our customers so they will interact with us,” they explained. “Lots of the customers that we're dealing with are vulnerable residents, and we need to make sure that we can make it as easy as possible – that’s what Open Banking is for us”.
And it’s not just about securing and streamlining existing payment systems. Our banking heritage enables us to be at the forefront of new solutions such as Variable Recurring Payments, which enable frictionless recurring payments with real-time, near-instant confirmation.
New payment options like this spark many emotions for a user – curiosity, intrigue, but also distrust and avoidance. Setting up a UI that prioritises an option like Payit™, and makes the benefits as clear as possible, will set up customers to take that first leap and then continue to choose it.
That streamlining process is the key to results from Open Banking. As Trish Garratt, Payments Product Manager at NewDay, made clear, the adoption curve from the point of implementation only gets steeper as Open Banking solutions become more mainstream and the long-term benefits are made clear.
For these new solutions to really have an impact, more needs to be done to encourage widespread adoption. But throughout the event there was a real optimism about the evolution of Open Banking. It’s not about potential anymore – it’s about the real value that’s already being unlocked.
Unlocking a bright future
Ellie Duncan highlighted that it is important to recognise that Open Banking isn’t just the result of regulation. As a smart data scheme, the potential to harness people’s information in secure and unobtrusive ways is huge.
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