Happy New Year Everyone! Goodbye 2020, and hello 2021! We are ready to get started and have a lot in store for all of our followers this year! We have a lot to share this week and hope you're ready for all of our announcements! As part of our passion to continue providing you with industry-leading information on the open banking segment globally. This update will have the weekly additions to the Open Banking Tracker (Banks, APIs, TPPs, etc.), and a look at how Open Banking and Sustainability go hand in hand.
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Our Current Coverage
- • We track 2,737 banks providing open banking services! (+658 from last update!)
- • 1,008 APIs currently tracked on our platform!
- • 404 TPPs in the ecosystem!
- • 85 Global markets covered!
- • 35+ API Aggregators! (with more coming very soon...)
- • Track over 60+ data points for all open banking projects!
- • And we are growing on a continuous basis... 🚀🚀🚀
Weekly Developments (Jan 11th to Jan 18th):
We initiated coverage and provided open banking information for:
- • Acorns
- • OnJuno
- • Mitto
- • Spriggy
- • Rho
- • Marcus by Goldman Sachs
- • Biggest Publicly Available TPP Registry in the Industry! 🚀🚀🚀
- • And many more!
We continue to cover over 35 aggregators!
Open Banking for Sustainability or Vice Versa? by Margarita Reznichenko
It wouldn’t be surprising to say that technological innovation brought significant progress to sustainable finance. Big data allows companies’ sustainability practices to be condensed into easily comprehensible metrics making it more accessible to their most prominent critic – the public eye. Societal expectations about companies' responsibilities resulted in the emergence of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing criteria, impact investing, green finance, circular economy, and so on…
Specifically, fintech and open banking have produced a sizeable societal impact while facilitating financial inclusion by building credit capacity, supporting SMEs (small and medium enterprises), and improving consumer financial literacy. For example, the World Bank report “Leveraging Islamic Fintech to Improve Financial Inclusion” provides a case-study of Angsur, a micro-finance provider targeted at students in Indonesia. Angsur is Shari’a compliant and bases its credit options on the digital presence, unlike traditional banks, which require physical collateral. The benefits of alternative financing solutions can only be extended by open banking – interconnecting financial institutions and start-ups, both domestically and internationally. Especially in developing economies, fintech has massive opportunities to influence sustainable finance. The figures below demonstrate the digitalization of financial services (especially in developing economies) and their effect on financial inclusion between the rich and the poor.
One may argue that the advances in sustainable finance are due, in no small part, to the same technological advances that drive open banking – more openly available data and more demand for inclusion.
So how can open banking benefit from the development of sustainable finance?
There is pressure on regulatory entities to release frameworks to evaluate companies' sustainable practices, and European regulatory bodies have already outlined their future efforts. As a part of the European Green Deal, new clearer standards for sustainable financing will be available, particularly the EU Green Bond Standards. Consequently, a ‘green bond’ standard will allow the industry to develop appropriate APIs points, increasing data about sustainable options available to investors in a unified manner – this could be particularly relevant for the wealth management sector. Another point favoring open banking is that compliance with regulations is now further facilitated by more transparent publications, such as the “Usability guide for the EU green bond standard” available on the EU website.
One may question the extent to which open banking is applicable to sustainability, outside the green investments, considering that a large part of open banking is about payments and accounts. However, by maintaining the societal demand for sustainability as a point of reference, one can see the unprecedented opportunities ahead. As an example, to provide more conscious customer service, or as an additional service, payments may include information about the sustainability score of the transaction, based on the companies involved. This can be condensed in the person’s account and have suggestions on how to improve their impact – tailored to the climate, societal, or other issues that the customer may choose.
Feedback
Please feel free to email us back with any coverage or data requests to implement or improve our current data set! We are a customer centric provider and want to make sure our users are as satisfied as can be!
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Have a great week and stay safe!
The Banq team