Hey all!
I recently wrote this article on the opportunity presented by Open Banking. As an early-stage fintech entrepreneur I find it endlessly exciting!
I’d love to hear any thoughts from this community. I’m based in TechHub Moorgate if anyone else is developing in this space and wants to meet up to share ideas.
Oli
I was originally excited for Open Banking but now it turns out to be for naught. Sorry to ruin your joy. 
I was expending that at the very least the directive would mandate a standard protocol/API format that all banks would conform to - that does not seem to be the case. For each bank you’d like to interconnect with, you have to integrate with their unique API. As a company that is a huge burden to integrate & keep up to date with every single bank’s API.
My other disappointment is because of regulations and certification requirements to become an “AISP”. It might make sense for online services that access and store your banking data on your behalf, but is counter productive for local-only apps that do all processing on your device where there is no risk of data being compromised. It’s even worse when banks don’t even let me access my own account over the API, and if they do, it’s still not up to the full extent of what Open Banking was supposed to provide (I still can’t initiate bank transfers from the Monzo API for example).
Overall I feel like “open” banking will just help out a few established players that have the means to meet all the nonsensical certification requirements. With the lack of competition those companies will stagnate and become what we call “legacy”. Many successful software projects started as a side gig with a prototype on spare time without external funding - but sadly none of those would be possible with “open” banking due to the barrier of entry.
Re: The standard protocol - this is precisely the role that firms like Salt Edge, TrueLayer or Yapily will play - helping to connect new propositions to the open banking framework?
Those firms are trying to solve a problem that shouldn’t exist to begin with. They’re also not cheap and a huge security liability.
So let’s work on solving this @anon23935806!
I’m also of @OliverM’s opinion that the possibilities are endlessly exiting, but it’s not going to be an easy jog on the flat on a mild autumn morning.
Looks like a spec already exists but nobody cares about it.
Not sure what else you can do at this point. It almost feels like this is a manufactured problem because the people in charge of those decisions have a stake in the aforementioned companies like TrueLayer, etc. Kinda like producing broken stuff on purpose because they also own the duct tape company.
This is where regulations should step in, but then again they are written by people with zero understanding of technology, and that’s how we got the cookie law and “open” banking.
@anon23935806 - I agree it would be ideal if the API structure were simpler…but this is a lot better situation than screen-scraping 5 years ago! I think this is the thin end of the wedge and the barriers to entry will lower further as popular adoption grows.