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UK open banking hits 10 million users

More than 10 million UK consumers and small businesses are now regularly benefiting from using open banking technology.

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UK open banking hits 10 million users

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

The milestone comes six-and-a-half years after the rollout of open banking in the UK, building an ecosystem worth more than £4 billion to the economy and creating around 5000 skilled digital jobs, claims Open Banking Limited (OBL).

Payment Initiation Service users are up 61% year-on-year, while Account Information Service users have grown 27% year-on-year.

Marion King, OBL chair and trustee, says: “Consumer empowerment is core to open banking and it’s fantastic to see more and more people and small businesses take advantage of the financial opportunities open banking provides.

“From access to cost-effective credit, building a regular savings habit or making more informed financial decisions, open banking is delivering the means for millions of people to improve their financial wellbeing, delivering a true public good.”

The OBL says that competition has been a key driver to growth, noting that when one company focuses on open banking technology its direct competitors soon follow.

The 10 million mark comes days after the government committed to introducing smart data powers through a new Digital Information and Smart Data bill. This legislation will lay the foundations for future growth of the open banking ecosystem, says the OBL.

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Comments: (1)

Jeremy Light Co-founder at Fourdotzero

The OBL website shows (for June 2024) 6.1m payments users and 5.17m account information users, presumably about 1m users use both.

These figures respectively were 2.15m and 4.2m users in June last year, so payments is the main driver of OB user growth.

While the 10m user milestone is a great one to highlight, what really matters is usage. Payment txns are increasing each month, but the payments per user has been stuck for over two years at 2 - 3 per month. For account information, no usage stats are published other than API calls, perhaps a metric such as data megabytes/month would be useful?

However, although open banking is supposed to be about data, the growth story shows it is more about payments than data and that increasing the payments per user through increasing business acceptance of OB payments is the main challenge for OBL.

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