At Inbest.ai, we think that Open Banking will allow companies to place FS product and services where they belong, co-piloting our lives and checking that we are taking the right decisions to protect our families, maintain our lifestyles or make our hard-earned salaries go further.

FS companies must be humble and flexible to seamlessly embed their propositions into the products and services we use during our daily lives i.e. banking should be a mean to improve our lives, not a goal on its own. To deliver this strategy, FS companies should understand intimately customers’ needs and behaviours as well as collaborate with companies in other industries to distribute their products and services. If FS companies keep working in isolation, non-financial players with large Balance Sheets will be more than happy to fill this market gap, as Bill Gates famously stated, “Banking is necessary, banks are not”.

Another alternative will be reducing their front-line exposure and focusing on a core part of the banking stack e.g. trading, foreign exchange, settlement. To succeed in this strategy, these specialised banking services should be easy to consume by companies that are downstream in the value chain.

All in all, regardless the strategic route partnering and collaboration should be a core foundation on the way modern FS providers operate, and APIs are the technological framework that makes this possible. FS providers should embrace the use of APIs across their different teams and divisions as well as with their suppliers and customers.