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UK's Open Banking to Launch on 13 January
- sleavey 9y ago“Open Banking is a term that describes a secure set of technologies and standards that allow customers to give companies other than their bank or building society permission to securely access their accounts." I can't tell if this is super-useful for the end consumer, or just another way for e.g. Google to mine your data in return for some superficial benefits.
- zoltaan 9y agoThe descriptions are so vague, the high ranking beneficiaries of the system are stating so little so long over and over (sounds like using the same bullshit generator with the same parameters) that there must be very very little and uncertain benefits for the users. If they, the insiders of the system, are unable to explain it in plain and simple facts then it must have very little about clients. What I hear? More parties could access (including manipulation!?) your account. More potential source of errors and problems - and possibly malicious actions. If something goes wrong it will be more complex to figure out where the problem was. Tracking who can do what is an added complexity to managing bank matters. All above means lower security. There is a potential that if more work on the same money they will charge more - assuming not doing it for charity but for fee. There must be hell of a heck benefits, increased efficiency to balance that, eventually leaving more at the clients on the disadvantage of he money industry.... doesn't seem a realistic scenario from a money industry initiative. I see better ways to improve banking, especially UK banking - compared to Scandinavia it is in the stone age -, but not through opening up banking secrets to a lot of parties. To me it goes in the other direction. Let me be wrong eventually.
- jstanley 9y ago> Open Banking is a term that describes a secure set of technologies and standards that allow customers to give companies other than their bank or building society permission to securely access their accounts. Does it have to be another company or will I be able to write my own software that has access to my bank account?
- ErrantX 9y agoYou have to be a company. You also have to be regulated as an AISP or PISP (Account Information/Payment Initiation Service Provider). So there are some hurdles.
- insomniacity 9y agoThat is disappointing. I wonder if anyone is doing the legal analysis on what it would take to be a 'passthrough provider', who would simply wrap it up in an easier API with a simple TOS.
- chirau 9y agoTeller.io is doing this. You might want to look into what licenses they needed to get.
- OJFord 9y agoNo it isn't, at least, not yet - it asks for all the user login information including passwords and security numbers required for a normal login. Edit: And unfortunately, it doesn't seem even to have any intention of using it: https://twitter.com/stevegraham/status/951163378424217600 https://twitter.com/stevegraham/status/951163378424217600
- ErrantX 9y agoTeller is interesting; I have some reservations (mostly around the attitude they portray, which is a bit unprofessional) but they have a good vision. The downside is they are encouraging you to share passwords, as you say, which isn't driving the right customer behaviour. More critically; in about 18 months the PSD2 Secure Customer Authentication guidance comes into force and this sort of approach (sharing credentials, which everyone basically refers to as "screen scraping" in its various forms) will be dis-favourer, to the extent that banks might have to go to great lengths to try and stop it. Teller might have to go forward fighting continual reverse engineering battles.
- sungam 9y agoAnyone know if the plan is to provide an API to the consumer for management of personal finances?
- ErrantX 9y agoNot right now; at first you'll have to rely on PFM tools built by companies rather than directly. There is a chance GDPR will give you as an individual more flexibility but it wont be mandated.
- insomniacity 9y agoThat is disappointing. I wonder if anyone is doing the legal analysis on what it would take to be a 'passthrough provider', who would simply wrap it up in an easier API with a simple TOS.
- hacker_9 9y agoWow, the UK is really embracing technology. You can do so much electronically though the Gov.uk website already, and you can even access your NHS medical record via a phone app. Being able to consume banking data via an API will no doubt open up a suite of more useful apps, that can help with managing budgets and planning for the future etc.
- lozenge 9y agoThere's no such thing as an NHS medical record, every hospital/care centre keeps its own records. What app are you referring to?
- hacker_9 9y agoThis: https://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/online-services/Pages/gp-services-choice-1.aspx https://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/online-services/Pages/gp-servi... And yes there isn't a single database, but if you transfer to a different GP they will transfer your records from your old GP, and this app then let's you view them too.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoThe records amalgamation was one of those £10s-of-billions software project that failed to produce any output [other than great profits and some nice bonuses, I'd warrant] wasn't it?
- hacker_9 9y agoThat is in the past, it was a single project from 5 years ago, and I think the companies involved were investigated by the FSA. Nowadays NHS is pushing software initiatives more and more, see here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/info-revolution/open-source/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/info-revolution...
- twic 9y agoThere's a thing called a summary care record which is in a central database: https://digital.nhs.uk/summary-care-records https://digital.nhs.uk/summary-care-records There are still a lot of details siloed in individual organisations, though.
- andy_ppp 9y agoFrom what I understand the molasses IT departments in these banks will be delivering very little that actually works on Jan 13th but we will see...
- Havoc 9y agoYeah. My impression of HSBC U.K.’s share trading platform was distinctly 1990 era.
- contingencies 9y agoIn general I loathe HSBC globally. However, FWIW their HSBC UK higher end XML based credit card gateway was the bees knees in about 2009. Best I've seen in my career. Awesome individual fraud rule reporting, total control. We probably had the ass-kicking total package though as I was developing a pan-European solution for a major handset manufacturer.
- dlfharris 9y agoYou mean the banks that still run systems on fortran?
- teh 9y agoI think this is the UK's implementation of EU PSD2 directive (e.g. [1]) so may not survive brexit. Looking forward to what'll come out of it though! [1] https://www.tsys.com/news-innovation/whats-new/Articles-and-Blogs/nGenuity-Journal/how-europes-psd2-regulation-could-spark-a-banking-revolution.html https://www.tsys.com/news-innovation/whats-new/Articles-and-...
- ErrantX 9y agoIt should survive; the EU Banking Authority is based in London (it will move post Brexit) and the UK treasury were major influencers on this legislation. Worth saying also; Open Banking actually came out of the UK competition marketing authority - its just become tied up with PSD2 (as its one way to achieve compliance with that legislation)
- Havoc 9y agoHaha. And my initial thought was ‘you see this is the type of thing the UK could leverage on arguing for UK thriving without eu’
- LeonM 9y agoI'm really excited by this (and PSD-2), as a banking API is the last piece of the puzzle to create fully automated businesses.
- simonswords82 9y agoIf you use a modern SaaS account app like Xero you can already access banking records no? What does this give us that you don't already have to fully automate your business?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoWTF? What is open about a system that only very few organisations can use? Imagine in the paper world, now you not only can ask the bank how much money you have, you can also authorize other companies to look at your account statements for you ... but noone got the idea that maybe you, the account holder, should be able to get a copy of the account statements? It seems we are still at the "reading and writing is for monks" stage of digital technology? God forbid the laypeople themselves use pen and paper!
- ErrantX 9y agoIts a fair criticism in part; but you are a technologist and so want unfiltered access to play with that data. For the vast majority of people that's meaningless - so to be able to share that data with companies offering new and interesting services (AIS sign up is reasonably lightweight, certainly within trivial reach of any startup) is a big step forward. I think we should be encouraging! (Or in other words; your thinking of the limitations on the micro level and missing the benefits at the macro) FWIW GDPR is more interesting legislation for what your after - you will have the ability to get access to your own data. Unfortunately that legislation didn't push hard enough to promote the idea of digital access - we should level our criticism most harshly there to try and effect change :)
- tialaramex 9y agoDigital access to your data isn't likely to work out generally unless you're happy with "Here's a PDF sent to your email address" in which case, sure, that's going to happen. I look after a system that has loads of PII, as a mix of traditional SQL databases and RDF with a bunch of RESTful service layers keeping it all in neat boxes so it's not a sprawling unmanageable mess. Now, if you ask for Subject Access after our verification team is happy that you're who you say you are I can and will extract the data that's clearly about you from those sources, tart it up and reformat it, and shove that into a PDF you can have. What I can't realistically do, even if they tried to legislate for it, is make say the RDF data structures somehow understandable to the lay person who thinks "graph" means "chart" and "a triple" is when you win three things in a row. OpenBanking works because ultimately the banks are pretty interchangeable when it comes to ordinary personal accounts. Money comes in or out, there's some short half-arsed text saying why, an amount, it's a very regular structure. But imagine trying to build a single "digital access" that works for your Reddit posts, health records, grocery purchases, subscription to Playboy, and MetroCard account... what on Earth would the UX be for that? Google gives us an idea what the best we could hope for is - if you sign in and say you want all your data, Google will ZIP it all up for you. But it's not a coherent system, it's just like somebody's old PC backup, a bunch of unrelated files in different formats in a ZIP file.
- sgroppino 9y agoI wonder if insurance companies or lenders with start forcing you to give up access to your main bank account in return for lower premium or rates...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Silhouette 9y agoIf they did, statutory regulation to prevent it would surely follow rapidly, and all they'd do is antagonize people and by extension the government and financial regulators. Doesn't seem like a worthwhile risk for them.
- xvilka 9y agoUK government is certainly on a good path of improving technological side of it. Along with more and more OpenData initiatives and migrating to FOSS (e.g. LibreOffice) it leads the efforts of many countries.
- Singletoned 9y agoI haven't seen a Marquee/Ticker on a website for quite a few years. The "Background to Open Banking" page made the fans start running on my (fairly good) laptop. If this is a sign of the technology behind it, it's not a good sign.
- alexchamberlain 9y agoI've read through their website a few times. Whilst it's easy to find the specs and a list of banks participating - you can even find some example code on GitHub - it's incredibly hard to find out what you actually have to do to be able to access the APIs. I appreciate that banking data is sensitive, but I think the on boarding process could be made a lot clearer.
- tjoff 9y agoWhy would anyone ever want to let a 3rd party company manage their bank account? I barely trust my bank yo do that... I'm afraid that some companies will try to force it upon customers as well. Starting with: "If you allow us to manage your purchase it will get even faster (oh and we get access to all of your financial info), and you also get a useless gadget!"
- blowski 9y agoPeople said the said the same about ATMs. They were wrong.
- tjoff 9y agoHow is ATMs remotely similar?
- xxpor 9y agoYou give a 3rd party ATMs permission to withdraw money every time you use them. If they wanted to, they could store the data on the stripe of the card and your pin, and steal all of your money.
- tjoff 9y agoThat's not worse than doing any purchase at all. If anything ATMs are the safest and best option available, well, aside from malicious hardware modifications done to them. Having access to my bank account with all the history is another thing entirely.
- pagutierrezn 9y agoSorry, but I can't see the benefit of it. Can anyone show a useful scenario... for the bank account owner?
- golangnews 9y agoIt would let you see the balance of all your accounts in one place, share data with your accountant or IFA, or apply for a mortgage without those tedious forms as well as photocopies of bank statements, offer proof of income easily, use apps that offer a marketplace for mortgages, savings or other financial services, use apps like xero, mint or Emma with any bank account easily, etc. It’s an API for your bank, and like stripe being an API for payments, I think it’ll shake up the market a bit. It should make a lot of things easier than before, and force large banks to allow customers to control their data more via authorised apps. It’ll take a while to have any impact though.
- based2 9y agohttps://www.paymentsforum.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Background%20Document%20No.%202%20-%20The%20Open%20Banking%20Standard%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf https://www.paymentsforum.uk/sites/default/files/documents/B... https://github.com/OpenBankingUK https://github.com/OpenBankingUK https://openbanking.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DZ/overview https://openbanking.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DZ/overview
- seanwilson 9y agoIs there any API in the UK that lets you get the balance of your current account?
- jasiek 9y agoYou should check out teller.io - they let you have "an API to your bank account"