CFIT to chair new Open Finance Taskforce

The UK Government has revealed that the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) will chair a new industry-led Open Finance Taskforce of financial institutions and technology companies.

The Economic Secretary to the Treasury Bim Afolami MP made the announcement at the Innovate Finance Global Summit in London today (15 April).

The Taskforce will build on the foundational work conducted by CFIT’s industry-wide coalition on Open Finance, which published its “blueprint” in February this year, by providing recommendations to the UK Government on how financial data can be used to improve SMEs’ access to credit.

It has been revealed that the industry-led taskforce will have a mandate to “identify and prioritise” more use cases for Open Finance, as well as the data sets to be unlocked and APIs that can be created to “facilitate better SME finance availability”.

In addition, it will be required to identify “commercially-viable approaches” that might incentivise businesses to share their data.

CFIT chief executive officer Ezechi Britton

Ezechi Britton, chief executive officer of CFIT, said: “Britain has long led the way when it comes to innovation in financial services, and Open Finance is the next great opportunity for our economy.

“So we’re delighted to have been invited by the EST to chair a new industry-led taskforce of leading financial institutions and technology companies.”

He added: “CFIT was founded last year to unblock the barriers to the growth of the UK fintech industry and today’s announcement will ensure we continue to keep up the momentum.”

Earlier this year, CFIT’s Open Finance Coalition set out a number of recommendations to “unlock” what is estimated to be £30.5 billion of GDP growth that Open Finance and personal data mobility could stimulate.

One of the recommendations made by the Coalition is the development of an Open Finance roadmap as part of a long-term regulatory framework and an implementation entity, in the mould of Open Banking Limited, to deliver on this.

It also published two “proofs of concept”, one of which is a pilot analysis with HSBC UK to demonstrate how accessing new datasets and auto-populating business loan applications can lead to a “significant boost” in lending decisions.

Listen to CFIT’s Ezechi Britton on the Open Banking Expo Unplugged podcast discussing why CFIT is the right organisation to drive forward Open Finance in the UK.