The Payment Expert Podcast is joined by the FCA’s Andrew Self to discuss open banking’s defining year, incoming statutory powers, and the road to open finance
In the latest episode of the Payment Expert Podcast, Andrew Self, Head of Open Banking and Finance at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), sets out why 2026 is a pivotal year for open banking, and how the regulator intends to turn rapid, industry-led progress into a framework built to last.
With Treasury legislation expected this year to hand the FCA new powers to set open banking rules, Self points to the distance travelled since the National Payments Vision called for acceleration around 18 months ago.
Much hinges on the Treasury, which holds the legislative timeline – and with a change of UK government landing the same week as recording, priorities could yet shift. For now, the FCA is working to what it knows: a consultation on its long-term framework before the end of the year.
From competition remedy to a durable framework
Self says the FCA is aware regulation needs to catch up with the market. The current aim is to consolidate existing payment services regulations and the CMA order, moving from a collection of disparate actors and mandates to a single lead regulator for open banking.
For PSPs, this means moving away from a limited, competition-remedy-based regime towards a long-term framework, which can offer greater certainty over how standards are applied with clearer roles across the ecosystem.
There are regulatory holes that still need plugging, Self admits, including reliability and error messaging, flagged as far back as the strategic working group’s February 2023 report. Progress has been incremental on this, he notes, with API success rates now around 99.5%, and a future entity is planned to drive consistency over time.
Cracking the commercial model
One of the issues which has dogged open banking since the outset is the absence of a sustainable commercial model. Self says the UK Payments Initiative (UKPI) – the first industry-led scheme for commercial variable recurring payments (cVRPs) – as the foundation for solving it.
He references the back-and-forth at the start of the year, when the FCA and Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) clarified that they would not, at this stage, prioritise a Competition Act investigation into UKPI’s centralised access-fee pricing model – a temporary measure which gave the scheme room to proceed ahead of legislation.
Incoming statutory powers, Self says, are designed so that this kind of one-off intervention is no longer required.
“We want to see the popularity of open banking explode in the UK,” he says. “We want to see it as a genuine choice for both consumers and merchants.”
The latest episode of the Payment Expert Podcast is available now on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms. Subscribe to the Payment Expert newsletter to make sure you don’t miss an episode.
