Slow Progress in “Open Banking Revolution”

There was a lot of anticipation of what might happen in the UK as lawmakers put in place the Payment Services Directive 2 in January of last year; a year in, banking in the UK is little changed with the biggest banks not losing market share across business lines as some thought; four banking licenses were issued in 2018 while 12 were issued in 2017; Anne Boden, CEO of Starling echoed this sentiment stating, “The U.K. still hasn’t seen the hockey stick of growth in disruptive new players everybody was predicting…Everybody was expecting PSD2 to happen and all these companies would be fighting with each other to provide services to customers.”; this is not only true with the banks, but MasterCard and Visa still control the payment infrastructure, but are starting to make some acquisitions; while there hasn’t been much progress in the last year the incumbents are still aware of the vast changes we may see in the next 5 years. Source