Open banking payments must move from regulatory mandate to a sustainable commercial model to scale, the FCA’s Andrew Self told Fintech Week London
Establishing “a sustainable commercial model” for open banking is “absolutely key”, said Andrew Self, the Financial Conduct Authority‘s (FCA’s) Head of Open Banking and Open Finance. He said open banking payments must move from a regulatory mandate to a sustainable commercial model to scale, in a panel discussion held at Fintech Week London.
Open banking had about 17 million UK users by April 2026, close to one in three adults, according to the FCA. Open banking payments rose 53% year on year, FCA figures show, though UK Payments Initiative (UKPI) reported that most of the more than 37 million monthly open banking payments are still one-off. Variable recurring payments account for 16% of open banking transactions.
Self pointed to the UKPI, the company formed by 31 firms to run a commercial variable recurring payments scheme, as the template for the next stage of open banking payments.
UKPI launched the scheme in June 2026, rolling out across government, charities, utilities and financial services over the year. Self said the regulator’s role was to coordinate industry-led delivery rather than mandate it.
Open banking’s early years showed how hard it was to move beyond the parameters set by the Competition and Markets Authority‘s original order, he said.
Open banking: from mandate to commercial model
Self said the same lesson applies to open finance. Firms bear costs when they open up data, he said, and the system must deliver services to customers “at a competitive rate”.
He said central coordination of standards, directories and a trust framework was among open banking’s successes and should carry into open finance. Self cited Experian Boost, which uses open banking data to improve credit access, as an example of the products the data can support.
He said the FCA’s work maps to its five-year strategy priorities, including fighting financial crime and becoming a smarter regulator.
Mortgages and the move to open finance
The FCA held a Mortgages and Open Finance Policy Sprint on 8 and 9 June 2026 and published the outcomes report the week before the panel. Self said every part of the mortgage chain could be improved through open finance.
The report found the main challenge is not access to more data, but whether data can be treated as “trusted evidence” and whether the infrastructure, accountability and participation arrangements needed for adoption are in place.
Self named three themes for the next phase:
- Obligations on firms to share the data they hold;
- The technology behind the next phase, which he said should be technology-neutral rather than a copy of open banking’s API model;
- And commercial sustainability, noting that the same data holds different value for different uses.
The FCA published its open finance roadmap on 14 April 2026, aiming to extend open banking principles to SME lending, mortgages, insurance, pensions and investments by 2030, starting with SME lending and mortgages.
Self said the FCA is running policy sprints, its Smart Data Accelerator and the PRISM taskforce to select use cases, and pointed to legislation under the Data (Use and Access) Act that will give the FCA powers to set open banking rules. Industry is to establish a Future Entity to own open banking API standards.
Infrastructure, consent and the UAE
Huw Davies, Co-founder and CEO of Ozone API, said open banking and open finance are “an infrastructure for secure consent-based data sharing”, not a product.
Open banking covers a small subset of financial data – day-to-day current-account activity – yet has widened access to credit, he said, and the larger value lies in mortgages, pensions and long-term investments. Generative AI tools layered on top could help consumers manage both routine and complex financial tasks, he said.
Davies said other markets are further ahead, including the UAE which designed commercial and liability frameworks from the start, with a revenue flow from users back to providers for higher-value use cases.
The CBUAE routes access through a single central API hub, with defined liability and pricing models. In the UK, the open finance market is larger and more fragmented, with hundreds or thousands of providers, and needs similar centralised infrastructure and a rethought consent model, he said.
Davies added firms should focus on the problem they are solving and warned that it is “possible to go too early”. Many firms in early open banking assumed the market would reach full scale sooner than it did and “ended up burning a lot of money.”
