Open finance has vast potential. It promises to transform financial services for millions of people through firms using customers’ data in bigger and better ways. But to make that promise a reality, we need to look at how it works in practice. How does sharing data solve real problems for people and businesses?
That’s the question we want to answer with our Smart Data Accelerator, which enables firms to showcase open finance solutions in a digital testing environment to help shape policy making.
Between November 2025 and February 2026, we ran 2 TechSprints. We worked with 17 firms to develop technical prototypes to solve challenges that are integral to people's lives – mortgages and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) finance. We saw how sharing data can lead to genuine benefits, and what needs to happen to create these opportunities on a larger scale. In mortgages, that means improving consumers’ readiness, helping customers make smarter overpayment decisions, and supporting people’s longer-term financial planning.
In SME finance, it means improved cashflow management, and better tools for assessing firms’ growth potential and lending readiness.
Open finance is an ecosystem
One message cut through consistently: open finance is going to develop as an ecosystem, not a series of isolated use cases. This means firms don’t create value merely by accessing more data. Rather, true value emerges when trusted data is combined, structured and applied to improve financial decision making for consumers, businesses and the market. Where people might have used separate products to manage their finances, these could now be integrated into a single user journey that helps them better understand their needs and solve real life financial challenges.
The TechSprints showed the way forward – firms building end-to-end journeys for different customers and situations using the same core datasets, rather than bespoke one-off use cases.
The advantages of reusable data
The benefits of reusable data packages were clear. Firms combined datasets in different ways to produce more insightful and tailored solutions for their customers. In other words, data becomes the context that helps firms understand their customers better. This in turn enables an integrated and interoperable approach to building products, allowing them to scale faster and more easily. But this can only happen with strong data standards, digital verification and trusted infrastructure. These elements will be the bedrock for AI to deliver smarter, highly personalised benefits.
What this means for how open finance develops
Because of this interdependency, developing open finance won’t come down to a single policy intervention or technical change. Its value only truly emerges through the varied interactions between datasets, firms, infrastructure and users.
This means the benefits are unlikely to arrive all at once, or evenly across the market. Some use cases might mature faster than others. In other cases, we might only see the real benefits once multiple components are all in place – a combination of data, standards, infrastructure, adoption and trust.
The TechSprints confirmed that firms are already moving from early experimentation to integrated solutions based on clear user benefits. They also showed where further work is needed to meet all the conditions for success.
Collaboration for the future
These insights are the foundations of the open finance regulatory roadmap. Next, we’ll host a mortgages and open finance policy sprint in June 2026, bringing together stakeholders to define the regulatory conditions for open finance to improve consumers’ access to mortgages.
There’s a clear connection between experimentation, technical insights and policy making. The Smart Data Accelerator builds on this to transform how we design policy and make decisions. The process becomes smarter, faster and more effective.
For open finance, the scale of the challenge is matched only by the size of the opportunity. Realising it requires a radical shift in approach, one that brings regulators, industry and innovators together to turn promise into practice.
Innovation flourishes when we create the conditions for it. By encouraging experimentation and shared learnings, we’re building the foundations.
Our doors are open to new ideas, genuine collaboration and data-led insight. Work with us to accelerate the journey from promise to reality, and to set a new benchmark for how innovation and policy can succeed together.