How Open Banking can help you manage your household bills
Combining your bank account data and the data from each of your household’s suppliers creates some powerful possibilities
Your bank account tells you what you’re spending on money on. With Open Banking, you can start to understand why. And by adding Open Utilities into the mix, you can take control and do something meaningful about it.
Please explain…
Ok, so Open Banking is the secure way to grant regulated suppliers access to your financial information, helping you gain more insight into your spending and make the most of your money.
At the heart of the principles of concepts like this — Open Banking, PSD2 (the EU Payment Services Directive) and GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) — is ultimately getting transparency into, and control over, our own data.
Where does Open Utilities come in?
Not wanting the banks to have all the fun, here at Onedox we have been making the concept of Open Utilities a reality:
In much the same way that Open Banking brings banking data to life, Open Utilities is the secure way for consumers to gain visibility and control over their household data — such as their suppliers, tariffs, contracts, documents, end-dates, bills, rates, monthly charges, yearly expenses, and much more.
That’s what Onedox can already do for you today.
While Onedox is at at the forefront of this movement — giving consumers control over their utilities’ data — unlike the banks with Open Banking mandates, suppliers of home utilities are not required to share a customer’s data with them in any standardised format.
So we’re doing more…
The Onedox team is actively designing a unique solution that will bring together the data from your household bills and suppliers, along with key data from your bank account, creating a powerful combination that gives you true transparency into your household’s spending behaviour and trends and control over your own data.
In addition, since challenger banks such as Starling Bank and Monzo were conceived with Open Banking at their very core, partnerships with key TPPs (Third Party Providers) such as Onedox become a possibility from the get-go.
As a result, Onedox has partnered with Starling Bank to bring Open Utilities into the Open Banking sphere by offering a solution enabling Starling customers to view household bills, reminders and personalised opportunities to save on household bills, all within their Starling app. You can find Onedox in your Starling Marketplace today under the Bill Management section.
It won’t be long before linking Onedox to any bank account is possible, and everyone can reap these benefits.
What else is possible?
Here’s a future scenario where you could benefit by Onedox combining your bank data with your household data:
- Onedox identifies a supplier that you’ve been paying on a monthly basis over a long period of time from your bank account;
- An account gets created for that supplier in your Onedox account;
- You’re prompted to link that supplier’s online account to Onedox thereby seeing all the account data and documents automatically appear;
- All the monthly payments you’ve made to that supplier from your bank account are listed and linked with a pdf of the relevant bill you received;
- All the payments and bill amounts are aggregated into charts enabling you to see how usage and spending trends over time compare to each other;
- But what’s this? Onedox sees that you’ve been paying your supplier increasing amounts over time for the same usage. Your contract also ended 4 months ago and you’ve been paying their most expensive default rate ever since.
- Onedox compares your rates against those offered by other suppliers and finds you 4 similar deals that would be suitable for your postcode.
- You pick one and Onedox does the rest: arranges the switch to the new supplier, confirms how much you’ve saved by switching to this new deal, cancels with your old supplier, cancels your direct debit, sets up a new direct debit, waits for your final bill to arrive from your old supplier, notifies you of the account balance upon closing the account, makes sure the supplier is paid or pays you the final amount owed, archives the old account in Onedox so you keep all the account details and documents for future reference, and documents every step of the way so you have a record of everything…phew!
- 10 months later, Onedox sends you a notification that your contract is coming to an end, and the process starts again, starting with finding you a new deal that can save you money…
Let’s see it in action…
Your bank account:
“You were charged £203 by British Gas this month.”
Your bank account + Open Banking:
“You were charged £203 by British Gas this month, which is £97 more than last month, so maybe you should consider switching to a new energy supplier.”
Your bank account + Open Banking + Open Utilities:
“You were charged £203 by British Gas this month, and here’s the related bill that explains why. Your bill was £97 more than last month because your fixed price tariff has just ended and your rates have gone up. Here is an available deal that matches your preferences (renewable energy, right?), that is cheaper than British Gas, and that’s available for your postcode and property. Swipe right to be switched to this tariff right now. No further action required.”
Powerful stuff, right? There’s just so much we could do. Why don’t we just show you:
