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Two thirds of UK consumers are concerned about how their personal financial data may be used as part of the Open Banking initiative.
Group Editor
Research organisation Ipsos MORI surveyed 14,800 adult bank account holders across 15 countries to gauge consumers views on the new initiative.
Open Banking is set to launch in January 2018 and will enable banks, with customers’ permission, to grant third-party providers access to online account and payment services data.
The survey showed that 63 percent of UK respondents see the forthcoming developments of Open Banking as new and promising to them.
However, research found around 9,000 respondents were worried how their data would be used and only 13 percent of total respondents would be happy to share data with third parties. Other than the UK, the countries with residents more worried about sharing data were France, Canada and Japan.
Paul Stamper, UK head of financial services at Ipsos MORI, said: “In order for people in the UK to adopt the new opportunities offered by Open Banking, financial providers will have to convince them of the relevance and practicality of their innovative new services.
“Banks have been cautioning us for years about the need to keep our personal banking data secure. Open Banking means that message is going to need modifying and consumers will have to be persuaded to change their attitudes and behaviours. The potential is clearly huge but it will require effort to realise it.”
In an exclusive interview with Credit Strategy, Stephen Jones, chief executive of UK Finance, said that Open Banking is being very carefully designed and that everyone who commissioned the original CMA9 to deliver the directive wants it to succeed.
He said: “Everyone behind open banking wants customers to have greater insight and opportunities as a result of being able to work with their data. I think we all need to work very, very hard and be extremely vigilant to ensure in opening up customer banking doesn’t inadvertently increase the opportunity for fraudsters to enter the system and take a customers’ data for bad or negative purposes.
“I think the Financial Conduct Authority has a significant responsibility in terms of its licensing regime and in terms of how it manages the way in which these new intermediaries come into the market place and use and protect the customer data that they access.”
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