Open Finance and the Primacy of Trust

The road towards the forthcoming financial revolution won’t be paved with data, but with trust.

The promise of open finance — built upon innovations in technology, the regulatory environment, and business models — is changing the way we think about payments, investments, and lending. Yet often missing in the rush to transform finance from a critical process to a product in its own right is the need to sufficiently provision sources of consumer trust.

When retail and service organizations evaluate the business case for open finance in light of their digital strategies, they are missing a critical point: data will never be worth more than the confidence their stakeholders have in their data practices. We focus on three points: trust has always been at the epicenter of banking and finance; the advent of open finance underlines how important fostering trust is today; and trust by design isn’t a question of adding value but of designing the foundations of successful practices.

Trust is the Foundation of Finance

The foundations of banking and finance have historically been set around value, credentials, and trust. Value can be defined as the economic, and utilitarian benefits a customer receives in exchange for the price it…