The ‘Amazonification’ of financial services is truly a game changer for businesses and individuals alike. With Open Finance, businesses (in any industry) now have the opportunity to develop innovative propositions that use that sector’s resources, without the capital and regulatory burden of becoming a direct participant in the regulated financial services markets - just as Amazon Web Services has enabled the explosion of SaaS businesses over the last decade.
Previously siloed aspects of financial services data, such as mortgages, consumer credit, bank accounts, investments, loans, savings, pensions and more can now be seamlessly connected thanks to the power of Open Finance and innovative TPPs (third party providers) such as Moneyhub.
As Angela Strange, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, predicts: “nearly every company will derive a significant portion of its revenue from financial services” - and in the not-too-distant future too.
What do we mean by ‘The Amazonification of businesses?’
Before we had Amazon Web services, if you had a brilliant idea you had to go out and buy equipment, find a building and spend ages wiring things together. All of this had to be done before building the first line of code. AWS flipped this on its head and now anyone with an idea can quickly and easily start a tech business. The same is now happening with financial services.
What is Open Finance and what benefit does it have?
When it comes to finances, there are three questions people tend to have:
What have I got?
What do I need?
And how do I get what I need?
Open Finance is a consumer content-driven approach to answering these questions by bringing your financial world into one place, and providing unique and relevant data, tools and insight.
In practice how can it be used?
Open Finance helps people solve real world problems. such as applying for a mortgage, saving, getting rid of debt, enabling payments, tax returns, and planning for career breaks, as well as even more technical challenges.
What is Open Banking?
Open Banking is built on top of the Payment Service Directive Two (PSD2). Open Banking has finally unlocked bank data and put it in the hands of its true owner - the business or consumer who owns the account. This has been a great first step for organisations towards true open data (and Open Finance) - something Moneyhub has always been working for.
Using Open Finance to help engage people with their pensions for Mercer Money
Mercer is the world’s largest outsourced asset management firm. They approached us with one core problem: “pensions modelling tools are typically over-complicated, arduous and stressful to use, and provide no incentive for people to come back and manage their finances.” We set out to tackle this problem using our technology to build the Mercer Money platform - offering Mercer customers a complete financial wellness tool.
Using Open Finance to support ethical investing with The Big Exchange
The Big Exchange (co-founded by The Big Issue) are building a community focussed on making a positive impact through an inclusive financial system that is available to anyone. We used Moneyhub technology to power their digital wallet and their marketplace - offering a win-win scenario where The Big Exchange can increase assets under management, the consumer is happy with returns, and the world benefits as a result of these investments doing good.
How technology can totally overhaul Mortgage affordability checking - making it simpler, fairer and faster
A building Society came to us with a vision: “there must be a fairer, quicker and more cost effective way to run affordability checks on customers”. Open Finance makes it possible to truly understand all aspects of a customer's financial world - well beyond what is visible from traditional credit reports. The result is mortgage affordability checking that is faster and simpler than traditional approaches and can say ‘yes’ to more people, offering a fairer outcome for applicants.