Think about the last time you ordered fries at a restaurant. Did you mull how many six-row windrowers and four-row harvesters went into the potato-farming effort?
Or when you turned on the lights last, did you wonder if the electricity was conducted through copper recovered via solvent extraction and electrowinning technology? And when you filled up your car, did you wonder if the gasoline came from crude oil produced onshore in Texas’s Permian Basin? Or did it come from a semi-submersible production platform somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico?
But when you pay a bill or buy cryptocurrencies on your phone, you probably do hope the underlying technology ensures safe and secure transactions.
Of course you do. Financial services are not commodities, and customers really do want to be sure banks are relying on the latest technology to promptly deliver the services they need.
To compete today, an entity must digitally transform both front-end and back-end operations to ensure utmost agility and responsiveness, and that’s done best via open banking. Yes, open banking allows for the sharing of customer data with third parties, and that has some feeling uneasy, according to Let's talk openly, a recent Mambu survey of 2,000 global banking customers.
Check out our survey numbers:
- 52% have never heard of open banking
- 61% of respondents claim they don’t use open banking--however, only 18.49% said they don’t use finance apps
- 57% of consumers’ biggest concern regarding open banking is data sharing
- 43% believe that open banking is a dangerous use of data sharing
On the flip side, 80% use financial apps to either aggregate financial information, pay bills, receive money, invest in capital markets--whatever. That’s all made easier by open banking. And now for some more numbers on the topic:
- 54% of respondents said they used between one and three finance apps, while nearly 20% said they used five or more.
- 52% said they needed to take more control of finances
- Thanks to the pandemic, the number of open-banking users doubled to 40 million in 2021 from 18 million just two years earlier.
People like the benefits that flexible banking models can bring, and millions of people may be on open banking platforms without knowing it. So the issue, it seems, is one of awareness, something providers must address. Let’s look at another flurry of numbers:
- 51% feel their banks “dropped the ball” when supporting them with open banking
- 49% believe their bank did not explain the benefits of open banking, with 24% claiming banks could have done better with their explanation
- 50% believed their bank did not explain the safety of open banking
- 40% said their attitudes towards open banking changed during the pandemic.
People like the benefits that open banking brings, and in Latin America, that’s probably even more likely, especially when market conditions are changing noticeably. Historically, about half the region has traditionally gone unbanked, though another recent Mambu poll found that 88% of participants, all younger Latin Americans (Generation Z and Millennials), said they enjoyed access to some sort of financial service, likely via smartphones.
Changes are apparent. Take the pandemic. According to this survey, 10% of participants made over eight (8) purchases a month, double the amount before the onset of lockdowns. Interestingly, those who reported they only made one purchase during a period of one month dropped in number significantly when the pandemic arrived, which suggests that people were no longer making purchases on their phones sporadically, but rather, they were doing so several times in a given 30-day period. The data indicate noteworthy potential for those involved in digital payments, a service made easier with open banking.
Here’s one last data point to close this blog: 57% said they would be more likely to use open banking services if their bank had more successfully implemented and promoted it. So if someone asks, let’s just start calling open banking for what it really is: smart banking.
Mambu will be with you every step of the way on this journey. Now turn off the light, crank up your engine and go enjoy those fries.
Read the full report here.