Re:The Profitability Challenge for Challenger Banks
by londons_explore on Sunday October 13, 2019 @04:19AM
(#21239203)
It isn't as good as it seems. The "API" doesn't even let you transfer money!
It's more of a read-only way to share your account statement.
(I deliberately avoid the word "stable" because everything in this space is still in flux.)
Semantically OB is a bit like OAuth. The end user authorises an OB provider to conduct [some] operations on their bank account, and the OB provider exposes their chosen functionality to the user. Due to the unit economics[ß] it will likely be quite some time before OB for retail customers can take flight.
I would have personally expected that the first uses of OB for retail customers would have been personal accounting services, because those could do with read-only authorisations. But the challenger banks exposed this natively in their apps, adding sufficient friction for third-party services to take hold, and in fact made it such an attractive feature that legacy banks have had to race to implement similar functionality.
ß: Businesses do a lot more transactions than individuals, so the overhead per retail customer remains high.