November saw Lloyds Banking Group host the first design hackathon of its kind on Open Banking, the ‘Build an Open Bank Challenge’, with participation from 14 partnering organisations spanning from big corporates to startups. As Open Banking and the new Payment Service Directive (PSD2) regulations are set to drive a fundamental shift in financial services, new opportunities are opening up to engage and collaborate with partners in an ‘API enabled Ecosystem’, or Open Economy. This ecosystem has the potential to provide a huge amount of benefits and opportunities for both individuals and businesses. Lloyds Banking Group sent a strong signal to its partners, showing that being proactive in this environment is of critical importance to secure success in the months ahead.
The Group provided the 14 teams attending with 3 key themes for development:
‘Banking Where You Are’ to allow for better, smoother contextual experiences;
‘Safeguarding Digital Identity’, enabling customers to safely and securely leverage their LBG digital identity across services;
‘Manage Your Finances & Plan for the Future’, helping customers understand the implication of their decisions and the impacts these might have on both their lives and their finances;
Team Moneyhub won the prize for Biggest Customer Problem Solved, having created a unique PFM proposition.
The team demonstrated their smart “My Financial Assistant”, a machine-learning algorithm that analyses a user’s financial accounts and transactions to discover intelligent actionable insights that help make customers feel more empowered and make better financial decisions.
As a logical, strategic development from the current LBG propositions, Moneyhub’s Demo easily secured itself victory having focused on putting the customer first.
Aneet Morar, Head of Partnerships, said:
“The participants’ efforts in the Build an Open Bank Challenge were truly impressive, producing propositions that could have the potential to benefit millions of our customers. I was inspired by the level of engagement from the partner teams and colleagues and am excited about further collaboration.”
“The learnings from the event are really important for the Group. Being able to provide a safe and secure environment to collaborate and shape opportunities with our partners will put us in a great position with the regulatory changes just over a month away. Collaborating with partners in these early days of change is critical if we want to continue to deliver the best experiences for customers.”