What’s next for Open Banking in LatAm?— LendIt LatAm 2020
Lendit Fintech will wrap up 2020 with its Latin America (LatAm) conference next week. While the conference raves a list of wonderful speakers including David Velez (CEO and Co-Founder, Nubank), Pierpaolo Barbieri (CEO and Founder, Uala), and Angela Strange (GP, Andreessen Horowitz), I am most excited about the panels focused on financial infrastructure innovation and the growth of digital banking in LatAm resulting from open banking.
Open Banking & CX
While open banking is definitely a buzz-worthy term in fintech today, it deserves discussion time given its implications for the customer experience. In 2016, the United Kingdom Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ordered nine of the nation’s largest banks to allow smaller players like fintech start-up companies access to bank data in order to maintain fair competition. This resulted in “open banking,” or the use of open-source technology and APIs to access data, such as transaction and account balance data, which was previously maintained privately by banks. Starting this year, The Central Bank of Brazil will roll out open-banking regulation mandating registered financial institutions to share customer’s transactional data with third-parties if a customer permits. The full rollout target date is October 2021. This year The Bank of Mexico published initial rules for an open banking model for clearing houses and credit information companies. The National Banking and Securities Commision also issued general provisions for the data to be shared via APIs.
Open Banking in LatAm
What was born out of the original UK regulation is a fresh new look at how we can use consumer financial data to help institutions and consumers make better financial decisions, personalize service offerings, easily transfer money and aggregate financial snapshots onto a single view. There are few better to speak about open banking than Nick Grassi, COO and Co-Founder of Finerio Connect, which is the first opening banking API in LatAm and has over 8M API calls from the region’s leading banks. In 2016, Finerio Connect began by improving the lives of Mexican citizens, and now is a leader outside of its original birthplace. A team member from Belvo, an open-banking API company now live in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia will also be a featured speaker at Lendit Fintech LatAm. Earlier this year, the start-up raised $10M from Founder’s Fund and Kaszek. Arcus, a fintech-as-a-service company with payments, financial data, and digital wallet services, which secured an investment from Citi Ventures last month will be a participating company.
Considering the importance of payroll data given how it can provide consumers with a more holistic financial snapshot and improve benefit management, Maya Dadoo, CEO and Co-Founder of Worky will indeed deliver valuable insights on this facet of fintech. Worky is an HR software and payroll platform for small-and-medium sized businesses, and in July 2020 the start-up announced a $3M investment round led by QED Investors.
It has yet to be announced in which panels Finerio Connect, Belvo, and Worky will speak, but you bet I will not miss them!
