Episode 41: Sharing open banking success stories — spotlight on UK fintech innovation

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Transcript of the recording

Elizabeth (Liz) Dempsey:
Welcome back to The SUMMIT Summer Series, a special presentation by The PayPod, the podcast from Payments Canada that explores the trends and topics influencing payments in Canada and around the world. 

I'm your host, Liz Dempsey.

Today, we are bringing you another great conversation from the deep dive sessions at The 2026 SUMMIT. 

This panel is entitled, "Sharing open banking success stories: spotlight on UK fintech innovation."

With Canada on the path toward open banking, also known as consumer-driven banking, who better to learn from than the UK? Having launched their open banking journey about eight years ago, they have learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. 

In this episode, you’ll hear how the UK's ecosystem has evolved into an innovation-driven model that is actively driving economic growth and benefiting consumers and SMEs alike.

We'll join David Prodger, Deputy High Commissioner for the UK here in Canada, as he moderates an expert panel featuring Paulo Barbosa from Banfico, Mark Hewlett from Ebury and Dean Morrison from Shaype.

Together, they share lessons learned on the balance of regulation, the necessity of getting commercial incentives right, and how Canada can leverage these insights to build a mature, thriving ecosystem.

Let's jump right into the discussion. Here is Dave Prodger.

David Prodger:
Good morning everybody. My name is Dave Prodger. You can probably tell that I'm the civil servant because I'm wearing a tie. So I'm the deputy high commissioner for the U.K. here in Canada, and it's a real privilege to be with you all today. I've got a fantastic panel with us today, and they're going to do all the talking. But what I wanted to do was just give you a little introduction, because we're a little bit further down the line in terms of time here in Canada. And obviously, we've learned quite a few lessons about how to do it, how not to do it. So as the Prime Minister here was in charge of our bank, central bank, when a lot of this was kicking off, he will no doubt have views. So this is an opportunity to really get under the skin of how we've been looking at it in the UK. What are the kind of challenges and opportunities that we found? So I'll ask my panelists to introduce themselves in a minute. But just to give you a quick heads up, Paulo Barbosa from Benfica. Mark Hewitt from eBay and Dean Morrison from shape. Welcome and thank you for being with us. We're just going to go through a bit about the landscape, the regulation, the ecosystem, and then what comes next before we do though. Just to state the obvious about why we're here and why the UK financial services accounts for about twelve percent of GDP in the UK. It's about two hundred and eighty one billion pounds. So that's getting on for four hundred and fifty billion Canadian. London is one of the world's biggest financial hubs. It's certainly one of the biggest international financial hubs. We have one hundred and sixty foreign bank banks, 21 per cent of our financial services firms and seventy nine percent of related professional services firms in London are foreign headquartered. So we are very much the world's international banking hub. And we do about thirty eight percent of foreign exchange turnover, about fifty percent of OTC interest rate derivatives and about fourteen to fifteen percent of cross-border bank lending. So, you know, this is the environment into which we were talking about sandboxes earlier. 

This is quite a high, high risk, high reward environment if we're talking about introducing new ways of doing things. So in terms of open banking and what the impact we were talking about, realizing some of the benefits, we've been doing it for about eight years now. It's gone from a sort of competition remedy to an innovation driven model, and it is driving economic growth. We've got over seventeen million user connections and thirty six million payments monthly. Kirsten already mentioned that even the government is using it. So our Revenue and Customs agency is using open banking tax payment schemes, which saw a twenty three percent year on year rise just over the last year and a thirty eight percent increase in associated value over the last year. So people are using it. People are beginning to trust it. People are paying their tax accounts. Well they're paying their tax to start with. So that's a good thing. A good thing for me anyway. They pay me so and it's just making it easier. It's lowering the bar to access. It's getting people less scared of doing this process and allowing them to sort of participate and lean in. We think we've seen about eight point three billion pounds worth of benefits already in five years. We reckon there's going to be over seven billion per year and eventually forty three billion pounds worth. So. So that's getting on for sixty and a bit Canadian, uh, year. But obviously this is not just about the consumer end. This is really very much about the SME. And, we're already seeing big benefits of about two point three billion pounds a year for SME benefit in terms of annual GDP uplift. So we're now beginning to see this come through. But I'm sure as our panelists will say, there's a lot more to do. So, I'm going to stop there. Hand over to my panelists. And then what I'm going to start with is just ask you all just to tell us a little bit about how the landscape is looking, what you are doing in that, uh, and then, you know, what are the projects that are firing you up at the minute in terms of the UK? And we'll just go down the line this way. So over to you. 

Paulo Barbosa:
Just a quick intro about Benfica and what, what we do. So open banking has been in the core of our services since day one. We have started with identity and access management, and from there we have expanded the technical building blocks for open banking compliance for banks, constant management, API gateways, everything that the banks needs to put in place in order to be compliant. Then we complemented that with the offering on the other side, for fintechs to consume that data and integrate with the banks. And then on top, the trust framework, the open banking directory, supporting dynamic client registration, certificate issuance and validation. And then the compliance and conformance for the, for all of these interactions to, to work. And we leveraged the experience we have in the UK to this day to take these building blocks and deploy it pretty much all over the world. So today we are supporting about nine open banking standards. And different models of open banking, uh, setups, centralized, decentralized. And we can support really in many small, in many institutions as well as tier one banks. And we can support central banks in deploying this open banking frameworks at national level. So our experience in the UK is still, you know, it's a gift that keeps on giving because we are, we are taking that experience and that, badge of honour around the world and say, guys, what we did here is working well, was very successful. And it's a really good success story that we are taking to different parts of the world. 

Mark Hewlett:
Okay, so my name is Mark Hewlett. My official title is Business Development Director for Ebury, which is the largest fintech nobody's heard of. So that's a true story. So, we're in thirty countries that employ around two thousand employees. Santander are a majority shareholder and we use open banking for numerous things. We're a client of Banfico. We use Banfico to verify customers that we send funds to. So we make sure we're sending it to who we're supposed to be sending it to. We also used open banking as a lever to become the first non-bank to be directly connected to the faster payments. Yeah, we use it for lots of things. We can use it for commercial purposes. We can look at client behaviour. We do the business for SMEs. So we can look at client behaviour where they've received money from where they're sending money to. We can also use it to look at past performance of settling bills. So from a credit point of view, we extend forwards to our customers to allow them to hedge. What else do we use it for? We use it as part of onboarding to understand our customer more. So we've been, you know, massive users of open banking, having that data and being able to see what a customer does and how they do it benefits the whole business. I, you know, not many firms are using it as deeply as we do. So we, you know, we, we, it's a, it's a massive thing for us. Massive. 

Dean Morrison:
Thank you. As you know, my name is Dean Morrison. I'm from Shaype. We're an Anglo-Australian payment platform. And I was thinking what Anglo-Australian means just before I got up here and it's like we have half British team, half Australian team. But the funny thing about it is half our Brits work out of the Sydney office and half the Aussies work out our London office. It's kind of strange how that works out. And I've opened up the Canadian office about ten months ago. So we're now Anglo-Australian-Canadian. So what's a canzuk? Isn't it. We leave the Kiwis out. We don't provide, uh, open banking per se. We're not an open banking provider or. But what we are. We're a payment infrastructure. We're a platform. So for us, open banking is part of the value chain that will make us successful and make us, uh, you know, work better and deliver better solutions as a platform or as infrastructure. What's crucial to us is we look at the value chain. And when I was thinking about what we discussed today, I was thinking, well, what is open banking by itself? And I think we have a tendency to look at it as a silo, as an individual product without being the convergence or the connection it has with the rest of the ecosystem. And open banking was successful both in the UK, less so in Australia. And I'll talk about that in a minute. But it was successful because there is a value chain, there are incentives, there is infrastructure, and there is an industry that's been created not from nothing, but it's come from an existing base that they're built upon. And that value chain ranges from your banks who are, who are the trust layer, right down to the entrepreneurs of the fintechs, the PSPs who are actually doing use cases that actually make a difference in the market. And then in between that, you've got that infrastructure layer that helps translate that trust into, into real life use cases. And it's all got to work together. And I'll talk about this later on, but it's also the incentives, the incentives have to matter. Infrastructure matters, regulation matters. And it all comes in one big kind of compounded ball of awesomeness that makes it all work. So that's where we are in Canada now. We're at the beginning of that. And it's how we use the international experience to make it better here and execute better here. 

Mark Hewlett:
Can I add just one more point? So we also use open banking to initiate payments because our customers use us for cross-border payments. We're not there. We're not their go-to bank. What happens is if a customer wants to send one hundred thousand dollars to Canada, for example, the customer, we can initiate that payment straight away. So instead of a customer having to login to HSBC, send us the funds and then we send the funds out, we can actually initiate that payment all in one, all in one platform. So it's a really nice use case which removed the biggest friction that our customers faced. So I just wanted to make sure. 

David Prodger:
No, no. And I personally appreciate that massively. Having a bank account in the UK and then having to spend money in Canada almost as much as the exchange rate is great, but it has actually made a tangible difference from a consumer perspective. The flexibility this gives you and the way it's driven down costs has been sort of existential. But coming back to the word bingo and the word trust. Of course, there is always this balance between and we're seeing this across the tech landscape and across all the disruptive technologies that are coming now, which is this: how do you encourage innovation while maintaining trust? And therefore, we have to talk about regulation a bit. So can we just sort of start there? And Mark, maybe I'll start with you from the from the sort of application and the use case end, which is are there, was there anything in particular around the way that the UK has handled the regulatory approach or specific regulatory actions that have sort of kick started this or enabled you to get on with it at the speed you want to, or the opposite that prevented you from doing that. And what are the kind of lessons you've taken from that? 

Mark Hewlett:
So I'd say it's a real boon to us. Open banking happened in the UK because of the CMA9 right? So it's a big stick that the government used to beat the banks with for not opening up and for taking so much money. So they wanted to drive innovation in the UK and they forced the banks to open up, you know, after that. and that was a real boon for us. So what happened was the that set up an entity, the OBIE most of you in this room are probably open banking geeks. So, they set up an entity where the banks had to have standardized APIs. And what happened after that was phenomenal. So, you know, I've had two phrases I've not heard for years. Recently, one was screen scraping. I've not heard that for about five years until I got in this room. and the other one was technical standards, which is what happened with PSD2, where all the banks went their own ways. We had the Berlin nineteen or whatever it was called, the Berlin group. And it was really painful for you to get all of these different APIs from lots of different banks and try to give a single platform. So the regulation that was a punishment for the banks really did drive innovation in the UK. If you look at Revolut, Wise, lots of different businesses probably wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for that stick. So it's been a real boon. So I love regulation. It's a good thing. I hope in Canada you do the same thing. and mandate the banks to have a standardised API that firms like Banfico can consume. 

Paulo Barbosa:
Can I add something there? So the regulation on open banking was included in a bigger umbrella. So the full centre of open banking was based on consent. So the consumer is the owner of the data. And it should be free to give access to a third party, but to consent to revoke that consent whenever he wants to. And that was a concept that was created even before as part of that regulatory wave that included data protection. And so this notion of consent was also included in the GDPR. For example, in Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation. And so there was a bit of a learning curve to tell consumers, you, you are the owner of the data, you should be able to, to do what you want to. It's true that the UK was more successful because there was this entity created to sort of force the banks to go in a certain direction. Of course, that came with the costs, rather high costs that some banks complain about. But in the end, I don't know if it was worth the result or not. I think it's debatable. But it's true that as you mentioned, we do see that the original intention of the regulation to bring more innovative and affordable services to the consumers is happening. And we see it happening. And it's, of course, when you compare it to continental Europe, much more successful than, than in most European countries. 

David Prodger:
And Dean, just coming to you, I mean, before we go on to the broader landscape and how the bigger financial institutions were dealing with this level of innovation, how is it what is it that that you took from the regulatory landscape as it opened up that enabled you to sort of get your foot through the door and really start operating in the new space? 

Dean Morrison:
I mean, in the UK, for us, I suppose it was the regulation as Mark said, it was based upon opening up competition, making it more competitive with what the Brits do very well. But it was market access. I think the whole democratization of payments, allowing regulated PSPs, to actually access the payment systems, the payment rails and be part of that value chain. So I think the regulation, what the UK did was, was, was incredible, was really, really good. But it's like any new thing, there was no precedent. Open banking hadn't been done before, to any great extent. So no one could foresee some of the potential issues. And in hindsight, you think about it, things like people say things like account to account, it's fantastic. It's going to place cards, it's going to be so cheap, but it's going to be great until you do liabilities and fraud and chargebacks and the rules, there are no real rules. And open banking faced the same challenges I thought they didn't have. They weren't like a scheme. They didn't have decades and decades of rule sets and compliance and roles and responsibilities. So it was very much ad hoc and it was like, the standards kept changing. And, uh, and then the other thing they did too, that was the access was fantastic. Having access to payment rails was great. Being part of those payment flows and being part of infrastructure was fantastic. But then I think in the early days, the regulator mandated all the banks to give access, for free essentially. And back to what I was saying before, incentives matter. If the economy's not there. If there's no unit economics that makes sense for the whole value chain, you're not going to invest, you're not going to reinvest in it. So you had situations where open banking in the UK was so ubiquitous that no one knew they were using it. You know, I had friends who were fintech people. They'd say, oh, I never use it. And I said, but you're using that, roundup platform or whatever it's called, which uses AI roundups and that's open banking. Oh, I didn't know that. But that's what it's like. It's so much part of the fabric that consumers don't realize that. And I know a few of the speakers earlier were talking about that. It's not something that people wake up and say, hey, I want open banking. Unless you're, you know, in this room, it doesn't happen. So incentives matter. And if each layer of that infrastructure value chain and that and that banks and the end entrepreneurs who are making a difference delivering to use cases, unless they can all make money, then it's irrelevant. So I think in the UK's experience, they probably went a bit too far initially. And so a lot of it broke. A lot of the data didn't work. You know, you had to reauthorize every ninety days, you know, so I use a for I got some properties in the UK and I have the bookkeeping. And because I'm so cheap, I do it myself. So it's all open banking. But every time I logged into my HSBC account or had to connect to HSBC, it had to be reauthorized. And it was so frustrating to do. and they did that because there was no incentive. HSBC weren't making money from it. So that's my message. Incentives matter in Australia with the regulation. They thought, oh, we'll be really smart and we'll actually give it to the scientists to create the spec, to create the regulation. And the specification was fantastic. It was so comprehensive. It did everything you wanted to do. But can you imagine a bunch of scientists delivering a commercial product? It just didn't work. So the layers of regulation were so onerous and so impractical that again, no one's going to invest in it. No one's going to make money from it because it's not, it's just not plausible. Eventually, they took it out of the scientists hands and they gave it to the competition regulator. But that was kind of worse because the competition regulator just likes to fine people, especially banks, because they think they're not competitive enough. So it was probably overengineered, I think, which I think the balance is. And again, this is where Canada has got a head start despite being late to the party. Like everyone says, it's because you can look at the two extremes and work out what's a good middle way. 

David Prodger:
So just so just continue on a little bit on the value proposition bit, because obviously looking at the broader ecosystem and the banks and then insurgent organizations coming up, doing things a different way, you know, that's an opportunity or a threat. And as you say, if you're driving down the cost, then your margins are getting thinner. Therefore, you've got to bring the volumes up. How were you looking at that from the perspective of what you were doing in your company and then explaining the value proposition to your investors, and then interfacing that with the wider ecosystem, including obviously, the big incumbents who, who have a had a set of incentives that were counter to what you were doing, perhaps. 

Dean Morrison:
I mean, beyond regulation, I suppose we're looking at now and again, it's back to that ecosystem. And when we set up the company was 2018 and 2017 actually in London. And we were part of that first wave of the later stage of the fintech revolution. It was like a really cool thing to be into fintech in London in 2015. You're invited to the best parties. Investors will go, “Tell us your fintech story,” and they'll be loving you. They'll be throwing money at you. Now it's all AI. 

You know, people don't want to know about fintech. It's like you've got to invest. Tell us about your AI story. It's like, oh, not again. I know we do have an AI story because we have to, but also it's part of the fabric. But I think the UK, the benefit of the UK, there was already a thriving fintech ecosystem and open banking or open finance or open data, whatever you want to call it, is another overlay. It's another way to, to connect all the payment and banking and finance propositions into a thriving ecosystem and allowing people and companies to start up with new use cases that deliver to specific problem statements and solve all these, these great sort of solutions out there and integrate into an already regulated, already operating, already experience and mature ecosystem and that was great. So in the UK we thrived because of that. In Australia we brought that mentality into the Australian market, which didn't really sort of have that experience. And we were very successful there too. Same thing in Canada. We're seeing the emergence or the nascent creation of that ecosystem. And I always say to my Canadian friends here, I think because of the RTR, RPAA, open banking should be seen in the lens of that whole. And also, agentic AI and all these great sort of technologies that are all now converging into, I think it's going to be a great decade ahead because of that. And I think this is called connected payments? Is that the name of the if that was from yesterday or something, it really kind of makes sense because open banking is so connected to the rest of the ecosystem, you can't just see it as a silo by itself. I don't think.

David Prodger:
Mark, coming on to you, tell us a little bit about how that kind of demand environment evolved in terms of the use cases and what you're doing. And then Pablo, we'll come on to you about how then you service that and plug into it. 

Mark Hewlett:
Yeah. So we've used it in a few ways. And like you said, we didn't really see it as open banking. We just saw it as a way to enable us to serve our customers better, whether that be, you know, most fintechs, we've talked about partnership and collaboration. What's something else that you need to realize is that most fintechs are banked by banks and sometimes better banks come along. So what we've had to do is protect ourselves and our customers from having to change account details. So open banking allowed us to issue our own bank accounts and connect to the schemes in the UK, which we did. And we also did that in Europe as well. So open banking allowed us to do that. So that was the first thing. So opening up the schemes and us being able to connect to the schemes was super important. What else did we do? We use it to, like I mentioned earlier, to verify customers' bank details. We use it to look at behaviour. And we use it to if a, if a bank queries what we are, what a payment, we can look at historical data without having to ask the customer. I'm forever banging on to my product team. Every time we have to ask a customer a question, it's creating, creating friction. So if we can look at data and surface it and pass that on to the bank, the customer doesn't know what's happening. It's all about removing friction to our customers. and that is very valuable to them. And we see very low, very low churn rates from our customers because we just do what they ask. And I know we're going to touch on AI. But using AI more for these things is super important. So we can start gathering more and more data because we've got the data answering questions in real time. So yeah, it just keeps on. It's a gift that keeps on giving, which I think somebody said earlier. 

Paulo Barbosa:
Yes, on our side. It’'s funny that in every new country we go to, we need to go through some sort of education phase where the banks sort of challenge the regulatory need to even share their data. Why would I do that? So the first thing we need to sit with them is let's first focus on the regulatory piece. 

And I think the decision that most banks take with us is build it or buy it. I think that's a very interesting report from the European Commission on the regulatory costs of PSD2 implementation. There's some public data on UK open banking implementation as well. How much have the local banks spent to be compliant with the regulation? Of course the ones that work with us, they, they do not do the development. They outsource this. But then the second phase is how can the bank leverage open banking to build new innovative use cases? So of course, I think that the payment initiation is the most liked one because there's a more clear use case and banks can, and even fintechs can monetize it. 

Data is not so straightforward. So you're mentioning fintechs were very high back in 2015. I think something that was repeated many, many times is that data is the new gold. Well guess what? Gold is still gold. And to this day, I don't think very, very few fintechs were successfully able to monetize data in Europe. So once the funding winter came, a lot of these open banking startups that were focusing on data went bust. 

And I think that's, that's a learning that, you know, we probably need to, to keep in mind here, but we see it that the banks are now, you know, leveraging, leveraging that data and taking the regulation as, as the baseline, but then building premium use cases on top of that. And that's, that's where we are working with banks in the UK and in different parts of the world on premium APIs, and how can they leverage the technology that they had to put in place to give certain information for free? But what kind of other information points and what kind of even treated and digested data they can provide to their clients that their clients will be willing to pay? And we do see some interesting use cases in the UK. I think HSBC is a very good example with an API marketplace where they provide very niche offerings, but very comprehensive, tools of offerings. 

Mark Hewlett:
And the banks are catching up. Right. I'm seeing, you know, I'm using lots of banks payment geek and love looking at UX, but we're seeing more and more banks that are surfacing account information from other banks on the platform or other cards. So I can see a big plug for NatWest here if there's anyone here. The NatWest app is absolutely phenomenal. It shows me everything. It's good. 

Paulo Barbosa:
Yeah. I think, you know Revolut is a very good example of, you know, an example of some kind of super app with a very comprehensive offering to, to the clients within the app. And it's pushing the boundaries. So if the other banks want to compete in that space, you know, they, they really need to, to step up their game there. 

David Prodger:
So, that brings us neatly on to what comes next. So we, we touched briefly on a sort of AI. Let's dive into that a little bit. Next, what's the next turn of the wheel in terms of the evolution in the UK ecosystem? What do you think? I mean, you sort of started off down this route. 

Paulo Barbosa:
So yeah, so AI it's a bit of a rabbit hole, right? So whatever we say today may not be very accurate tomorrow, but for sure it will give us more, you know, better tools to treat the amount of data that we can now access through open banking. 

So I think there's a lot of potential on the data side. There are already some use cases that are being worked on on the agentic payments. And we have our trust framework we are working on, on the technology side to, to support that, secure and trusted connectivity. But then on, on the open banking space, you know, I think it will, it will be for sure a game changer on the data side. And maybe it will be an opportunity to, to make some more interesting and commercially viable offerings on how to expose and treat data that consumers are sharing. 

Mark Hewlett:
Yeah. So we've gone very deep on AI. So we set up an AI entity internally and spun that out. And that's concentrating on fin crime. So using all this data we've got and the more countries that go into open banking, the more we will use. So, you know, like I said, we're in 30 countries. We send funds to over o190 countries at last count. But fin crime is where our focus is. I also, the thing I lose sleep about most at the moment is agent to agent. If you think about it, our customers very soon are going to start just asking the agent. I need to send one hundred thousand dollars to Canada again for you, David. How do I do it? And then they'll, they'll just find that open an account and it's done right. So we could have a blockbuster. I've threatened the teams. We could have a blockbuster or a, or a Kodak moment if agents can't find us. So it's like search engine optimization all over again. 

I'm pretty convinced, as I'm getting older, that customers, you know, remember in the old days, if you wanted to go somewhere, you'd have to get a map and find out where to go. You know, I'm convinced in a couple of years time, people will sit there and say, the internet was so hard, I had to search, I had to search for something, and then I had to click a button. Then I had to go back and check another one that was so archaic. It scares me to death. It really does. So, I want a customer to, to sit there and say to its agent, I want to send one hundred thousand dollars to Canada and they send it via Ebury using Benfica to make sure the account is in the right place. But yeah, it should be keeping lots of people awake at night because they're just going to keep, they're just going to keep coming.

Dean Morrison:
So the questions on AI.I didn't prepare an AI about really what comes next in your vision, the future of Britain. And I've kind of checked out of Britain. I'm now Team Canada, so I'm long Canada, what I call it soccer now, not football. So that's how much I've changed. Yeah, I've gone native. I'm complaining about the development next door to the council. So I'm. I'm really a case as Casey, my colleague, can tell me. He's a Torontonian born and bred. I've really adopted Canadian culture. 

AI, I mean, I can talk forever on AI, but it's probably not relevant for this. Our application with AI is not so much open banking. It's more on the regulatory side of things, moving from a, from a black box to a glass box. But that's another story. What is that? The last question was on the question. 

David Prodger: 
Well, I'm just going to come on to what is the sort of one lesson you take away from the UK, but finish on. Finish on what comes next. And then we'll come on to that. 

Dean Morrison: 
What comes next in Britain or Canada? 

David Prodger: 
Yeah. Well in the ecosystem let's start. We're talking about the UK. So let's talk in the UK.

Dean Morrison:
I mean UK, I think the challenge for the UK with open banking, open finance is to make it a part of payment infrastructure and go beyond the, the, the regulations and going beyond the market access to actually making it a stable piece of infrastructure, not another payment rail, but but something that can be trusted. And I mentioned before the account to account payments, there's a reason why the schemes, card schemes, are so successful because they're more expensive, but they are reliable. People know the roles and responsibilities and open banking in the UK, we still haven't solidified it as a mature payment option or finance option yet. So I think that's where the extra work is going to go and that's where the Brits are working on. 

David Prodger:
It's not had its London Underground moment yet, has it where you tap. that. Correct? 

Dean Morrison:
Yeah. The ubiquitous, uh, standardized expectations. You know what you're getting? Yeah. 

David Prodger:
So, we'll leave time for questions. So just quickly now coming on to the Canadian bit of it, what is there a particular lesson that you would take from what we did in the UK and apply it into where Canada is now in this discussion, and what would that be? 

Dean Morrison:
This I've thought about. I think what the Canadians have done very well, which the British didn't do was I think the British had the multitude of regulators involved, had the competition regulator, I can't remember their name, FCA who are always there and, the payment systems regulator, which was appropriate, but then I think we had lack of accountability. 

And what Canada is doing is putting it with the oversight of the Bank of Canada, I think, which is where the whole RPAA- RTR oversight is. Which makes sense because as my narrative is or my theme is, open banking should be seen in the wider payment ecosystem or banking ecosystem. And it makes sense for the Bank of Canada to be involved in the oversight. But then I was at a panel yesterday and I thought I asked a killer question. I didn't answer it properly. And the killer question was, how do you measure success? Right. They were very good at that, you know, adoption and you know, this all the stuff. But I said, who's accountable? At the end of the day, if success doesn't happen, who's responsible? And they didn't, they didn't even answer it. 

And I'm thinking the answer to that is, everyone's accountable, obviously, but each part of the value chain has to have to make an effort or, or play a role. It's got to be a single regulator that actually focuses on, on creating that ecosystem, but that ecosystem has to be fed by the right regulatory or legislative environment, the right policy, whichI think is happening, but also competition economics. Back to that theme again, it's got to be able to make money for the people to be interested. It's got to give the banks the incentive to actually invest. Because I don't know how many people from banks are here, but they're probably sitting here thinking, what's this going to cost me? How much extra work is this going to be? You know, what overhead am I looking at when it should be like, well, this is actually interesting. You know, we know our role, we know our place, we know where the value chain is going to be. And I don't think that that sort of foresight is quite there yet. So I think where Canada can really excel is to adopt that shared responsibility, understand what success is, and be able to measure that and work out what role each of us are playing. 

David Prodger:
Thank you, Mark. 30 seconds. And then we'll get on to some questions. 

Mark Hewlett:
I'd just say, you know, make sure that the API's that the banks or any financial institution is showing you is, is standardized or it's, you know, the same, the same entity. So it makes it easier for participants to, to get them and be able to be able to use them. That was the fundamental reason why it worked so much better in the UK than it did in Europe. Yeah. Go, go with that. 

Paulo Barbosa:
Yeah. Then I will just add, you know, it's indirectly related to the UK, but you know, Brazil adopted the UK standards and they develop a lot of use cases. and you know certain APIs based on certain use cases. So that will make it easier for everyone to identify the value and from the get go while implementing it, everyone knew what will be the final use case. So I think that sort of speeds up the adoption and the usage in the end by the consumers. 

David Prodger:
Well done. Thank you very much indeed.

Liz Dempsey: 
That brings us to the end of another episode of The SUMMIT Summer Series. A big thank you to our expert panelists, Paulo Barbosa, Mark Hewlett and Dean Morrison, as well as our moderator, David Prodger, for sharing their global insights with us.

As we heard in this discussion, delivering a successful open banking framework isn't just about who moves first, it's about building trust at scale. It requires that every part of the value chain is properly incentivized and prioritizes collaboration to unlock real, secure economic benefits. 

If you found this conversation a valuable one, please be sure to hit subscribe on The PayPod wherever you like to listen. 

Be sure to stay tuned — We have plenty more insights, trends and defining moments to share from The 2026 SUMMIT still to come this summer. 

If you want to experience these conversations live next year, save the dates for The 2027 SUMMIT. We’ll be back in Toronto on May 4, 5 and 6!

I've been your host, Liz Dempsey. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode of The PayPod!