One of the best places to hear unfiltered insights on industry developments are the various conferences and trade shows taking place across the payments sector every year.
In 2024, Payment Expert had a presence at a myriad of the industry’s biggest conferences. A key topic on the agenda for the team at each one was Open Banking, hearing what industry experts had to say on the tech’s potential and future trajectory.
Payment Expert kicked off the year by attending ICE in London, an event for the betting and gaming industry which is also frequented by a number of payments and fintech companies targeting this sector.
Sitting down with Roberto Villani, VP of iGaming at TrueLayer, at the trade show, Payment Expert heard the Open Banking provider’s views on the tech’s potential for igaming. Villani was particularly confident about Open Banking’s ability to provide an affordability solution to the sector, something we’ll come back to later.
“Open Banking adoption has been doubling year on year for the last five years in the UK and it’s a technology that’s there to stay,” he said. “I think what’s really driving that is the UX and the usability of the service.
“There’s a sense of affinity between innovation and the gaming industry and I think Open Banking really sits in the middle of those two, it’s very fit for purpose when it comes to the digital journey of the players.”
The trade show which saw some of the most discussions about Open Banking was Pay360, hosted by The Payments Association (PA) in London, and which Payment Expert was a media partner of.
The event saw Joe Garner, author of the Future of Payments Review, one of the most important government documents focusing on the UK’s rapidly developing Open Banking scene, share his views on how the sector should progress.
Garner noted the ‘difficult birth’ of Open Banking, and emphasised that more work is needed around consumer protections. “It can grow without it, but do we want it to?” he summarised his view on consumer protection.
The government also saw some representation at the event, with John Penrose, a former MP for the Conservative Party, discussing the then-government’s Data Protection and Digital Information (DPDI) Bill.
Penrose’s enthusiasm for the legislation would all be for nought, however, as the DPDI would later be shelved after Labour beat the Conservatives in the July general election – in which Penrose would also lose his seat.
Lastly, Payment Expert found some time to speak with the Payments Association at the event, talking to the trade body’s Head of Policy and Government Relations, Riccardo Tordera-Ricchi, about fraud, government policy, and Open Banking.
“Many will know we are in a wonderful position where Open Banking is something that is a British success story, we’re leading the world,” he said. “We weren’t the first, Australia got there before we did, but we leapfrogged them.”
The Conservatives’ enthusiasm for Open Banking was reiterated again at London Fintech Week, where Andrew Griffith, then Economic Secretary to the Treasury, doubled down on the government’s view that the UK is a fintech leader.
“There are now over seven million different users of Open Banking, and are now seeing over a billion successful API calls every month,” he said.
“But I believe we can do so much more, and we are in a key moment for the Open Banking regulatory regime. Our vision for the financial data sharing market is fit for the future, increasingly frictionless, competitive and scalable for new technologies and uses.”
Luckily for Griffith, the MP for Arundel and South Downs would keep his seat in the July election and later became the Shadow Business and Trade Secretary. Luckily for Open Banking also, the Labour government under PM Keir Starmer and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, appears to share its predecessors Open Banking ambitions.
Last and not least, we come to the Payment Expert Summit, held as part of the SBC Summit in Lisbon in September. The event saw plenty of debates across its three day agenda, covering Artificial Intelligence (AI), fraud prevention, and anti-money laundering (AML). emerging markets and unified payments.
On the opening day, a panel of gaming and payments experts discussed Open Banking’s potential as a payment method for betting, and as a solution to industry affordability concerns.
The consensus was that whilst the potential is there, convincing betting customers to adopt a new method, especially one which hinges so heavily on data sharing, will not be an easy task.
As we approach a new year, banks, fintech firms, regulators, government and businesses interested in using Open Banking have a lot of factors to consider.
Consumer protection is one of them, as is the related topic of data protection. Interoperability, ensuring Open banking can be applied to as many sectors as possible from energy to betting, should also be high on the agenda.
