Open Banking: Emergent Roles, Risks & Opportunities

The phenomenon of financialization has received increasing attention, especially following the global financial crisis. We broaden the scope of research on financialization by investigating Open Banking initiatives. Such initiatives aim to enhance the banks’ ability to personalise customer experiences. Consumers and businesses can now easily share their data with banks and third parties to manage personal accounts and compare banking services. Such initiatives raise important questions regarding the future role of banks as well challenges and opportunities inherent in the new Open Banking landscape. We empirically investigate five Open Banking initiatives through twenty-five interviews conducted with users of Open Banking APIs as well as those managing the various initiatives. From these interviews, we develop a taxonomy and identify four open banking roles: integrator, producer, distributor, and platform. A further contribution is made by identifying related challenges and opportunities faced by fintechs and incumbents in the shifting landscape of retail banking. The challenges identified include risk of disintermediation, loss of reputation and transformational failure while the opportunities identified include enhanced service innovation and risk mitigation. Overall, the study provides first insights into how the retail banking industry will adapt to new service innovations and increased collaboration with third party fintechs.