Banks are now showing a deep interest in Open Banking—at least for the corporate world—and while the level of maturity still differs among players, at Accenture we have been able to create a maturity ladder and position players along this ladder.
Tier one of the ladder consists of defining a level of ambition: Providing a “banking-as-a-platform” offer, either global or by type of client (from ING’s offer to entrepreneurs, to Credit Agricole’s focus on the agricultural sector), and/or “banking-as-a-service” solutions (easier to orchestrate for commercial and investment banking-driven players organized by business line).
Tier two includes building the application programming interfaces (APIs) and structuring them into offers. While we see a lot of activity related to payments, cash management, trade finance/factoring and financing (based on existing financial solutions), we see few advisory solutions emerging, probably linked to the lack of a business case. Indeed, banks have only just started developing new revenue models, and usually with new types of “clients “ (such as the BBVA Developer platform).
On the other hand, we see few players actively building the full capability model to develop Open Banking at scale. This entails structuring centers of expertise around innovation and design, operations (platform and service management, community management, pricing and other elements), data and analytics (including new topics such as data ingestion and acquisition), technology (developer portal, API lifecycle management, API factory) and sales and marketing, in addition to the traditional product and services, and corporate functions such as compliance and legal.
Tier three will probably focus on developing a coherent, meaningful journey within a wider ecosystem of partners.
At this stage, exchanges with other platforms are still in pilot and often are delegated to third parties (for example, software companies such as Finastra are actively working with ERP to position the banks’ services in corporates’ ERPs, or banks’ consortia are in discussions with supply chain consortia to enlarge their ecosystems).
Similarly, banks have yet to leverage into Open Banking society issues such as creating a circular economy to avoid waste or supporting small- to medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) access to financing.
I will continue reporting on trends in trade finance, Open Banking and other topics from Sibos.
