FISERV
“ When we think about how we serve our clients every day , it ' s all about earning their trust ”
SUNIL SACHDEV HEAD OF FINTECH AND GROWTH , FISERV
in other regions like Europe – but North America is slowly beginning to catch up , Wilcox posits . For the customer , he explains , this brings innumerable benefits . And , where once open finance was mostly about personal financial management ( PFM ), it is now spreading into other exciting use cases including real-time account verification , real-time money movement , and new ways to pay at a merchant such as pay by bank .
“ The consumer will benefit because there ' s going to be a better mitigation of fraud and risk ,” Wilcox says . “ Financial institutions will benefit because they ' ll be able to provide more financial wellnesstype solutions , and I think everyone else is going to benefit from a more personalised experience and new options for faster , more secure money movement . Having access to the data within an open finance environment is going to make things unique for you or for me in ways that we haven ' t even thought of yet .”
Even in a very simple sense , onboarding and ID verification are changing . The option for consumers to share their personal transactional data through an open API rather than having to manually upload documents is powerfully transformational . And in these times , it is imperative that businesses have a thorough handle on who their clients are . Wilcox believes we ' re witnessing a tilt towards open finance being primarily driven by compliance and AML use cases .
“ We ' ve been building and nurturing our data aggregation platform , called AllData , for about 15 years now ,” Wilcox continues . “ The original use case was PFM ; now , we ' re seeing the use cases of that data aggregation platform explode , especially with open finance . A couple of things have happened . First , we ' ve moved away from the old model of screen scraping to direct access agreements , and we can now pull data in real time , which means real-time data can be used in open finance ecosystems .
“ Data aggregation has moved beyond a PFM use case where we ' re now using it for fraud and risk management . We ' re using it for verification that a user is who they say they are . That a given user owns the account they say they own . If they then want to connect another bank account at a different bank , we can verify their ownership in real time .”
This has taken on renewed significance in the past year . Multiple disparate sanctions lists mean that companies need to know who their customers are more than ever ; coupled with a crackdown in the US on money laundering , compliance is a key consideration for fintechs and banks alike .
Putting consumer power back in consumer hands Despite the optimism around open finance , it ’ s clear there still need to be checks
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