In Europe the banks are being forced to open up APIs for third-party access to bank accounts. Obviously, this will cost money and entails risks. But from the work that Consult Hyperion has already done for banks in this area, I think I can see at least one way to build a positive business model around them.
What’s the big picture around banking, payments and innovation? Maybe the new paradigm will be the bank as facilitator of innovation rather than innovator. Maybe we want banks to be boring and efficient.
In time, banks are going to be “Amazonised” and will open their APIs both internally and externally. So what should the focus of the API be? The customer, maybe, rather than their money.
It’s important to understand why APIs are so strategically important, not only in the payment space but in the financial sector as a whole. I thought I’d put together a few posts on the European banking API environment because it is rather dynamic at the time of writing. So here we go!
APIs will certainly revolutionise the services the banks provide, but they will also revolutionise the way banks work.
It’s traditional in blogs of this kind to have a go at a “top N” set of predictions for the coming year, so I’ll give it a bash and have a go at what I think will be the “hot five” secure electronic transaction technologies that will have our clients updating their roadmaps in 2014.
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