UK Open Banking Reports 5M Users

More than 5 million people in the U.K. use open banking services, the country’s Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) announced Thursday (Feb. 17).

That figure comes from data provided by the CMA9, the nine banks and building society mandated by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to implement open banking. The milestone follows the fourth anniversary las month of the creation of the regulatory requirement, when more than 4.5 million people and businesses were using open banking.

“What is especially exciting for us — and for our ecosystem — is the impressive trajectory of that growth,” OBIE said in its announcement.

“It took 10 months to grow the number of users from 1m to 2m in 2020. In contrast, it has taken just four months to grow from 4m to more than 5m, demonstrating the increasing appetite for consumers and small businesses to use open banking services to move, manage and make the most of their money.”

Read more: Deep Dive: How Open Banking Helps Accelerate B2B Payments

OBIE says payments were the major factor fueling this growth, with 625,000 additional payments in January compared to December, helped along by HMRC’s incorporation of a “Pay by bank” option into its annual self-assessment process, which took the total number of payments made via open banking to 3.86 million in January. That is an increase of 19.3% over December 2021.

See also: UK’s CMA Finds Open Banking Entity Failed to Stop Intimidation, Conflicts of Interest

Last year, OBIE came under fire from the CMA after an investigation found that the entity has had substandard governance and did not prevent bullying and intimidation of staff.

OBIE was enacted in 2017 with the goal of sharing transaction data with new entrants and promoting competing services to create a more democratic way of doing business, instead of allowing the same small group banks dominate everything.

However, the CMA’s report found the head of the group, Imran Gulamhuseinwala, had too much power and not enough checks and balances, leading to mismanagement.

The CMA concluded that it and the retail banks that made OBIE would have to accept responsibility for the failings, as well as “study lessons” on how the effort had gone off track.