Events

Many winners, one standard: the power of an industry-led model

25 March 2026

Open Banking in the UK is evolving from a competition remedy to an innovation-driven model with a real focus on driving wider economic growth. Marion King, Chair of Open Banking Limited, will outline projections for the potential benefits, growth, and opportunity before us, what we need to do collectively to achieve this, and the changing nature of the open banking model to better drive innovative products and services.

Good morning everyone.

I’m Marion King, Chair and Trustee of Open Banking Limited.

The entity that has, for the last 8 years, built and maintained the first Open Banking Standard and trust framework, and in a sense, together, we’re the founders of the wonderful ecosystem that has been created.

Many of those founders will be here in this room, and to you I want to say thank you for your continued efforts to further our industry. We couldn’t do it alone – our progress as an industry is a product of extensive collaboration.

I want to start with a thought: that the pace of change today is the slowest we will see in our lifetimes. Change isn’t just accelerating, but compounding.

And that change means embracing new technologies, new ways of thinking,

fresh approaches, and new business models.

We need to embrace, and fuel, the pace at which things are moving, not resist it.

Knowing when to pivot, instead of preserve, really matters.

That’s why the momentum we’re seeing in open banking in 2026 is so significant.

It’s gaining even greater traction, with now over 17m user connections and 36m payments monthly[1]. It is truly becoming a part of everyday life for millions.

And I want to set out the reasons why I take these numbers seriously.

First: they’re an indication of economic growth.

Open Banking Limited recently commissioned EY to carry out an economic analysis titled ‘Unlocking the everyday’.

It focuses on the current state of open banking here in the UK – the home of open banking.

It looks at value creation to date, where we’ll end up in five years’ time based both on current adoption, and then on full-scale adoption.

It has uncovered something striking.

That open banking has already delivered an estimated £8.3bn[2] in cumulative benefit to date.

That’s based merely on current levels of adoption: 17 million user connections a month. 

And it’s telling us two things.

First, that our industry is generating genuine economic growth, here and now.

It’s empowering consumers to make more of their money.

Educating them to make choices that make their money go further, and open the door to improved services.

Such as favourable loan repayments on terms that suit them.

Lending is the largest potential opportunity to be realised, where using real-time data in affordability assessments can support better access to credit.

Or by allowing people to sweep money from a current account to one that is higher interest-bearing, on a schedule they dictate.

That helps them save for a home, plan for big purchases, or create a nest egg.

Holding cash as opposed to a proactive approach means your money is not working for you, nor for our capital markets.

Open banking services and products are about democratising investment for the people, and allowing this investment to contribute to UK Plc.

And the report identifies an area with the biggest impact:

It’s helping our SMEs through cloud accounting platforms – by feeding in their banking data to help them plan cash flow or manage late payments.

And secondly, this figure of £8.3billion tells us something about the bigger picture – at a macro-level.

At a time when the UK is, against a challenging backdrop, ever more determined to generate economic growth, open banking is providing high-skilled jobs and supporting innovation.

It makes the UK a place to do business, where an entrepreneurs’ thoughts on a whiteboard can translate into unicorn companies.

The two can be linked, of course. If SMEs spend less time doing their own arduous accounting, they can get out there and work harder to expand their business and turn a greater profit.

Given that 99 per cent of our businesses are SMEs – if we want the economy to grow, then they need to grow.

And the economic analysis we’ve carried out also looks five years ahead, and that’s where it gets really interesting.

Annual economic benefits could reach £7.4bn after five years as adoption continues to scale[3]. And that’s only if we continue growing organically, on the same trajectory.

But, at full maturity and adoption, the long-term annual opportunity across the economy could be significantly larger – up to £43bn per year[4]. 

That is a huge prize.

But how we reach these figures is important. The next stage will be critical in us moving from merely a projection on a page into real-life.

Those of you in the audience immersed in the open banking ecosystem will know – we’re collectively embarking on a substantial shift in the open banking model, as we move towards the long-term regulatory framework.

One that brings in voices from the breadth of the ecosystem, to create a model that truly reflects the market that has been created.

We’ve already seen how a standardised framework supports innovation; in the future we see a vision where that framework also supports multiple commercial schemes.

In a world where multiple data sets will be shared, true interoperability will come through this shared infrastructure and rules.

Interoperability: so that schemes in different economic sectors may speak different languages, but when they come together, they still translate.

But this requires a collaborative effort – we want to instil a mindset that when we work together, we make progress. And we must instil a mindset that we’re collectively allergic to standing still.

I know from my career in payments at NatWest, MasterCard, Vocalink, that there are always commercial interests at play and asymmetric incentives. This is all rather obvious in a commercial market.

But we can work with, not against, those characteristics.

It is possible to achieve both commercial success and societal benefits. The two are not mutually exclusive, and indeed where we can marry the two goals, we find the key to success.

Commercial Variable Recurring Payments (cVRPs) is an example of this cross-section.

With 31 firms coming together and agreeing to fund a commercial scheme, UKPI, the first new scheme since 2008, using the services of Open Banking Limited.

These firms are of every size and with views that can sometimes differ.

But their willingness to seize the opportunities before them means that, very shortly, customers will be making the first cVRP transactions. 

It’s an example of this change in mindset – collaborate and move forward – and paves the way for the future of open banking more broadly:

That we can indeed bring together firms that may not currently play in the same sandpit.

But with the right incentives, they can create a model that has both commercial gain and societal aims.

Crucially, this new model will be fit for the future.

It needs to be future facing: one that is agile and can adapt to advancing technologies.

And, on that, it would be remiss of me not to mention everyone’s favourite buzzword: AI.

This year, Open Banking Limited will be producing further thinking on how AI interacts with the Open Banking Standard, and where we see opportunities that allow the ecosystem to make good use of it.

Open banking has taught us the power of rich, reliable, consent-based data.

We understand the power of quality data, available in a readable format.

And we apply those same expectations to AI.

In reality, businesses such as cloud accountancy platforms are already using AI to streamline their services and deliver smarter customer experiences – powered by insights from current account data – that have a direct impact on the bottom line.

But where can agentic AI take us?

It has the potential to seriously shift the dynamic in payments: an agent can manage financial transactions on behalf of its users and complete financial transactions on behalf of its users.

But, there’s no agreed standard as yet for AI-driven payments, and that fragmentation could risk the prize.

Blockchain is fundamental in agentic AI. Distributed Ledger Technology, or DLT, shows real promise.

It has moved from being an emerging technology to one which is maturing, and there are clear use cases in the world of payments.

The issues of slow clearing and settlement times have been designed out by new models and blockchain.

And yet, while there appear to be many benefits to using DLT in payments, we’re yet to see widespread implementation.

But how does this interact with open banking?

Well, open banking is fundamentally an overlay – it can be an interface with any underlying payment system.

We are technology-agnostic.

Should DLT really take off, open banking will prove itself to be what we know it to be: agile and adaptable. The same applies to a tokenised, multi-money world.

One of the strengths of open banking is that it is forward-looking by design, and its future model will be nimble. Adaptable. And built to evolve as technologies such as AI or tokenisation become mainstream.

As the various discussions at this conference underline, there is a shared focus on the future direction of the payments landscape.

But the reality is, that open banking is borne out of a competition remedy. We are fundamentally, and to our core, pro-competition and enterprise.

We do not wish to pit ourselves against the use of any payment type.

But we do believe that we can make a difference to the status quo. By offering choice – and a choice that is secure, transparent and low-cost.

It’s not about being a winner – we’re all clearly working hard to make sure UK payments are delivering what customers need, and it’s about doing better.

What we want to ensure is that there is choice, innovation, and simplicity.

There is no better endorsement of the use of open banking payments, than by HMRC.

Between January 2025 and January 2026, HMRC saw a year-on-year increase of 23 per cent in the number of transactions, and a 38 per cent increase in the value.

This is significant, because I’ve mentioned simplicity.

When paying taxes with account-to-account, users can trust pre-populated fields that means less errors, and HMRC can rely on faster settlement times with lower fees.

What we’re keen to do, is build off use cases such as this and make the use of A2A ubiquitous.

And I want to touch finally on this: the world is watching us closely.

The UK is the third trillion-dollar tech economy, after only the US and China.

The regulatory clarity of the FCA, CMA, and others, combined with our strong rule of the law, gives fintechs the impetus to invest.

There is inherent trust in the British system.

That is, that if you play here in this market, you know the rules of the road, and we have measures in place to prevent and resolve issues, with a risk-based approach.

This trust creates confidence.

And this brings me back to why the next stage of open banking is so important.

Good regulation creates markets.

Responsible, measured regulation has most certainly driven open banking through strong industry collaboration, supported by a centralised entity, and with consistency achieved through a level of mandation.

Around the world, we see countries that have used legislative or regulatory routes, such as Brazil and India, as well as those that have a voluntary environment such as the US and the UAE.

But, we can see that there is a direct correlation between central standards and an increased level of adoption.

The open-source nature of the open banking standards have meant that many countries have either simply adopted them, or have used them as a baseline from which to build upon.

Up to 95 countries have some form of open banking under way, but we were the first.

You could say that the UK gifted open banking to others, but it also means we’ve laid the foundation for cross-border interoperability in the future.

And this is enabling many other countries to scale and expand. 

So: the race is on.

So, as we look to the next phase, I want to come back to this: commercial viability and public good are not mutually exclusive. 

When we build trusted, interoperable rails that people can rely on, adoption grows.

When adoption grows, real commercial value follows.

And when commercial value follows, with it comes investment, incentives and momentum.

The golden prize of £43bn of annual growth is there for the taking. But getting there isn’t a given.

It requires a concerted effort. It depends on us having shared rules, shared ambition, and a shared commitment to move at pace.

[1] January 2026 figures API performance stats – Open Banking

[2] Unlocking the Everyday – Open Banking

[3] Unlocking the Everyday – Open Banking

[4] Unlocking the Everyday – Open Banking

Business statistics – House of Commons Library

Location: Pay360 2026, London 

Delivered on 23 March 2026 (original script may differ from delivered version.)