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DCA Strategy Sprint: Open Banking

By February 24, 2023No Comments

Twelve DCA members white-boarded the business opportunities created by open banking.

On Wednesday, a dozen DCA member executives worked together to brainstorm and document the business opportunities that will be created by the full implementation of open finance principles.  Like our November Strategy Sprint on tech disruption, the session was an opportunity to look into the near-future and assess likely positive and negative impacts on companies and digital commerce more broadly.

The group worked in small groups to brainstorm and document answers to the following questions:

  1. As consumers assert more control over their data, who wins?
  2. What’s the core value proposition that will drive this forward?
  3. What are the most powerful forces holding it back?
  4. What are the compelling use cases or worthy pilot programs in the following three areas:
    • Financial services and insurance
    • CPG and loyalty
    • Housing and real estate

Clippings from the Conversation

Dozens of ideas were shared and chewed over.  One example stuck with me – it’s the kind of thing we just take for granted, and it doesn’t get fixed in part because people who have the problem tend only to have it once: the sometimes mind-bending bureaucracy associated with emigrating to a new country.  Shortly after moving to the USA, my mother was asked for her social security number.  She didn’t know what it was.  Turns out they are issued to new immigrants when they got their green cards.  Or at least they were – you only have to do this sort of thing once, so I really don’t know how it’s done now.

On matters of banking and housing, it’s not uncommon to need an address to get a bank account, and to need a bank account to get an address.  Documentation from origin-country banks, property registers, insurance companies and whatever else are cumbersome to retrieve.  Couldn’t open finance principles and apps be transnational in nature?  Why wouldn’t one be able to share account data from RBC, Santander or Banamex with a lender in India, the UK or USA?

Questions DCA Members are Asking

  • As consumers assert more granular control over their data, what will start to change faster?
  • Which competitors are best positioned to grow faster when fueled by more granular consumer data?
  • What specific consumer data points would transform our business if we had efficient, permissioned access to them?
  • How can we position ourselves to be a trusted partner to consumers – so they will be willing to share their data with us?
  • How can we position ourselves to be a trusted partner to incumbent account-holding institutions (banks, insurance companies, or integrated platforms like Apple/Amazon) so we can build customer solutions in their ecosystems?

Related DCA Resources

  1. Commerce Code Episode 103: Fin-Tech Innovation & Open Banking
  2. Commerce Code Episode 96: Nudging Consumers into Retirement Savings & Charitable Giving 

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