Report

The Open Banking Impact Report (Oct 2021)

03 November 2021
Report

In our second Impact Report (October 2021) we evaluate the continued expansion of open banking services in the UK and their growing adoption.

We also analyse consumer reaction to open banking services and explore whether they are changing how individuals manage their finances and whether they are seeing long-term benefits to their financial health.

The key insights in this Impact Report are:

  • Availability of services continues to expand, although the pace of growth appears to have slowed. We have comprehensive coverage in three outcome areas: decision-making, payments and borrowing.
  • Adoption has continued to grow with 7.5 – 8.5% of digitally-enabled consumers now estimated to be active users of at least one open banking service.
  • Our research found that most customers (91%) find services easy to set up and they have a positive Net Promoter Score (NPS).
  • Most customers of these services (76%) intend to continue to use them.
  • Services seeking to help consumers make better financial decisions seem to be doing exactly that. Significant proportions of customers claim that these platforms are helping them keep to budgets, reduce unnecessary expenditure, shop around and minimise fees and charges.
  • We see similarly positive findings on the savings side, with customers reporting that these services have helped them save more and build a financial cushion.

About this report

The Open Banking Impact Report is a key tool to help policymakers and others in our ecosystem to understand how open banking is developing and whether it is helping the UK’s consumers and small businesses.

The report is built using a methodology developed by the Personal Finance Research Centre at the University of Bristol. The insights are based on several data sources and research studies which we detail in the methodology sections. We produce a new report every six months.

Read the report.