Open banking aims at banks letting third party financial actors (e.g. FinTechs) have access to customer data, as well as to financial products and services. The PSD2 regulation (Payment Service Directive 2), which imposes an obligation on banks to provide third parties with access to essential data (e.g. the current account balance or account movements) via application programming interfaces (APIs) at the customer's request, has contributed significantly to this development.
This leads to a break-up of existing power and monopoly positions, because Open Banking creates completely new possibilities for many financial market players. It is to be expected that Open Banking, i.e. the joint use of data - up to and including shared IT infrastructure - will lead to more innovative services in the long term.
