Drumbeat for ‘Open Banking’ Grows Louder

SEATTLE — The call for “open banking,” which would allow for greater access to banking services for developers and others, seems to be getting stronger.

Yesterday at Bank Innovation 2014 here, open banking through an application programming interface, or API, appeared to be gaining adherants, and not just among seed-round startups looking to overturn the fintech apple cart. Rather, innovators at established financial institutions look as though they are coming around to inevitability that APIs are their future, not a threat to their businesses.

Rabobank, based in the Netherlands, for one, appears to working toward opening access to its technology stack, in part because of a mandate from the European Union. MasterCard has embraced partnerships with fintech startups, and, in my view, that’s a precursor to open banking. Finally, the blunt recognition that “banking in the US sucks,” in the words of Kosta Peric, deputy director, financial services for the poor, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, implies an understanding that something must be done to make banking better — and APIs is a way toward that.

Peric also argued that the “future world of banking is all about volume.” By that, Peric meant that volume of transactions will become more important to banks, and, to me, this implies a move toward crowd banking services. A banker at one of this nation’s largest financial institutions that I spoke to during a break here agreed with Peric, adding that peer-to-peer financial services puts so many more “transactions” into a single product sale, which could have greater long-term value to the financial institution than the transaction itself. For example, if a consumer takes a P2P loan through a bank, there is the loan transaction itself and then all the “peer” contributions or participation in the loan as well, feeding the bank’s need for transaction volume.

Peric said, “Customers don’t want to feel captive,” and attendees at Bank Innovation 2014 largely agreed with that sentiment. API Banking, as attendees started to call it, is one such means toward that goal. Making banking “not suck” is another.

Follow today’s developments at Bank Innovation 2014 on Twitter at #BI14.