You might be familiar with the expression “Open Banking”. Open banking is sometimes also called “Open Bank Data”. It’s a banking practice that provides third-party financial service providers open access to consumer banking information like AC balance data and transaction data. It all started by the decision from the European Parliament’s decision “Payment Service Directive” (PSD2) in 2015. That directive set the technical standard of what data should be able to retrieve through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The PSD2 directive has been somewhat copied to most parts of the world today even if the EU GDPR legislation doesn’t come in to play in other geographies than EU.
So, what have we learnt so far is that hundreds of start-ups have been trying to outperform incumbent banks with new “hyped” apps and value props but with mixed success. We have learned that a few HUBs have been very successful in establishing a standard for how to aggregate and categorize the customer data and then sell that data back to banks and other interested buyers. I am talking about companies like TINK or AIIA here.
But we have also learnt that the PSD2 APIs alone are not good enough to create a competitive enough product to compete with the banks. Screen scraping is still used in same cases as a result of that.
"The banks should prepare for embracing the full set of data into your app and display not just balance, savings, and PFM, but also non-life insurance, life insurance, occupational pension from all your clients─ current as well as former employers”
This is a sigh of relief for banks, which felt themselves to be in the firing line and extremely challenged, five years ago.
Today we can see more and more banks developing so called “Premium APIs” where anyone can retrieve more and better data given two conditions:
1) The ultimate customer give consent to give it away
2) You pay for the data when you buy it through the API
This has become a new source of income for banks, and it has shown that banks (no matter how non-popular they sometimes are perceived to be) are trusted by their clients to handle the data compliant and correct. The Financial Ecosystem (Connected API structure where end-customers can get enhanced customer experience by sharing their data into that structure) that is evolving shows that the customers want to share their data with trusted partners if they get a better product or service, BUT this is if they trust the data is handled safely.
This is where I think the Open Insurance can short cut the learning path. Open Insurance is like Open Banking where EIOPA (EIOPA is one of three European Supervisory Authorities) has decided to standardise APIs the same way as PSD2 has but this time regarding insurance and occupational pension data.
The standardised API is most likely not going to be good enough this time either, therefore, this is a great opportunity for the insurance companies who will, in parallel, develop premium APIs.
My forecast is that incumbent banks will have the gravitas and needed scale of traffic in their apps to be the marketplace for insurance and occupational pension traffic. Insurance companies’ own channels are too narrow and niched. Just ask yourself how many times you’ve been into your bank app already today and then try to remember the last time you logged in somewhere to see how your insurances or your pension looked like. I bet it wasn’t this month.
So, the point here is that the banks should prepare for embracing the full set of data into your app (for private individuals and SMEs) and display not just balance, savings, and PFM, but also non-life insurance, life insurance, occupational pension from all your clients─ current as well as former employers.
And for Insurance companies, let go of the costly vision to drive traffic to your app or website. Be smart and develop efficient datasets to be sold and distributed through premium APIs and be ready to launch those in parallel with the APIs that EIOPA will force you to build. That’s how Open Insurance can learn from Open Banking.
