The Open Banking revolution is not yet fully implemented in the UK, despite being ahead of its European peers when it comes to data sharing, according to the trustee of the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE).

Speaking on a panel at the PayExpo in London, Imran Gulamhuseinwala said the UK has some way to go in fully realising the benefits of the second Payment Services Directive (PDS2), but suggested that the financial data sharing enabled by early adoption of Open Banking is just the start of a much wider transition to Open Data.

Gulamhuseinwala, who was appointed by the Competition and Markets Authority in 2017 to lead to oversee the roll-out of Open Banking protocols, said: “I think we’ve come an awfully long way it’s been a lot of very hard work, we’re ahead of many countries in Europe, but I would say that unfortunately I don’t think we’re fully there.”

He added that despite the passing of the original 14 September deadline for financial institutions to prepare for the adoption of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), there are a number of “outstanding issues” that remain to be addressed by the industry.

“I think the performance of the APIs hasn’t settled down enough yet and is not of sufficient quality to be business critical,” Gulamhuseinwala stated, adding: “But I can very much see my way through those immediate challenges and actually think that over the course of the next six months we’re going to tie up many of those final loose ends.”

Looking to the future, fellow panellist Dan Globerson, head of Open Banking at Royal Bank of Scotland, predicted that Open Banking would evolve into a much larger data sharing phenomenon incorporating customer ownership of data from other areas of their financial, social and health activities, as well as more consolidated disruption of the payments industry.

“We’re at the tip of the iceberg, simply the very beginning of what will be a much larger public debate around how do I as a member of the public know who has my data, what they’re using it for, so Open Banking quickly works with Open Finance,” he explained.

Globerson added: “I think we’ve started something that won’t end anytime soon and I also don’t think it’s particularly bank centric, it’s everything centric.”

Gulamhuseinwala agreed that the trajectory of Open Banking to expand beyond the banking sector into areas such as pensions, utilities and the information held by tech giants such as Facebook, was apparent since its launch.

“Even though this started as a regulatory initiative, it was very clear that there could be loads of spinoff benefits of what we’re doing because it is a huge cost and effort for the industry,” he said.

“I would say in the UK we’ve started already, pensions are moving, that’s being legislated for, energy is moving, it’s a little bit further behind, and there is a pipeline to discuss that takes you through the finance sector, utilities type sector, then government data and arguably some of the information that Big Tech holds” Gulamhuseinwala explained.

“But I think at the moment it’s principle driven – it’s driven by the fact that consumer data is valuable, we’ve only just realised that but we don’t really know how it’s being used.”

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