So today quite a few newspapers ran (quite alarmist in tone) stories about open banking starting next week - going from the comments, the response was overwhelming negative - the main driver seems to be that most people seem to think that this is a way for banks to sell your information and leave you wide up to scam.
I did think the option of open banking was going to be slow but not this openly negative.
Any links to online articles, please?
Unfortunately behind a paywall. Leading headline more reminiscent of the Daily Mail.
Yeah, I got one of those articles on my Google feed.
Considering I hadn’t actually heard of Open Banking before meandering around the community, people that don’t know about it may be scared off a bit by those articles…
Liam
More related stories.
To be fair, the Guardian article is pretty good, a lot less negative than the headline sounds. Most of it is about what Open Banking is and the opportunities it will provide. There is a small section at the end about possible risks, but it’s reasonable.
The beginning of the Telegraph one (middle article 
) sounds more sensationalist and uninformed, so I didn’t bother registering for an account to read a pile of 
. A line like this does not give me confidence, though:
These include companies fraudulently pretending to be part of the new system to obtain individuals’ data
Fraudulent companies will not be able to connect to the Open Banking system, as only FCA-registered companies will be able to access data.
To be fair, the Guardian article is pretty good, a lot less negative than the headline sounds.
Look at the comments - overwhelming negative and show that a lot of education about what open banking is - needs to be done.
Haha, I never look at comments on news sites. That’s why I’m a happy person. 
Given the reputation banks have with the general public I’m really unsurprised that this has received negative reviews.
I received letters from my banks last year informing me of this (so the 92% who claim to know nothing about it obviously don’t read letters from their bank) and my immediate reaction was ‘why would I give third parties access to my accounts?’
I still haven’t heard a compelling reason.
As an aside, I signed up for a service called bill monitor some time ago which promised to look at my mobile bill and search the market for a better deal to save me money. I only pay £12 per month, so I wasn’t expecting much. I receive an email every month informing me that the cheapest equivalent deal they can find is £15,000 per month and that I should remain on my current package. So my faith in third parties being able to find better insurance or energy deals for me is somewhat diminished.
For many people there is no compelling reason - however for some of us it’s because it allows for aggregation of our accounts in one place in a more secure way that simply wasn’t possible previously.
If you don’t want to use it, that’s fair enough but it’s clear that the public have fundamentally misunderstood it and think it’s about the banks having the ability to sell on your bank account data.
This is certainly true. I think there are two main reasons.
Firstly, there is a deep mistrust of institutions which harvest data, and there is a general mistrust of banks. They are perceived to be opaque, vast, rapacious entities which will seek to squeeze every last penny they can from customers. One of the comments under the Guardian piece is illustrative of this mistrust. The gist being; if this was good for customers the banks would have lobbied it out of existence.
The second reason is that there is a basic tenet of communication that the responsibility for ensuring that the message is received is in the hands of the sender of the message. Perhaps the banks have an interest in engendering this fundamental misunderstanding?
I’m looking forward to seeing some of the developments and applications that will make use of this data. I looked at a number of financial applications recently that required my bank login details to work… needless to say I didn’t sign up to these services in the end but it seems that this is type of thing where open banking really makes sense. I’m not sure if it will be token based access to user data but it’ll certainly be better than handing over your login credentials to an unknown 3rd party(Moneybox, Yolt etc) which so many seem to already be doing.