Lloyds Launches Open Banking App Feature

Lloyds Bank, a British financial institution, has released a new feature to its banking app that will allow customers to see their accounts from other banks together on one screen, according to reports.

The app will also have a feature referred to as open banking, which shows a list of scheduled payments and when they are due. Lloyds and Halifax customers can view personal accounts from six other banks, and the Bank of Scotland debuted the feature for its customers in December of 2018. Customers of those three banks can look at accounts they have with Nationwide, Santander, RBS, HSBC and NatWest. More banks will be added in the future.

Barclays released a similar function in September of 2018. In May, HSBC UK launched “Connected Money,” which also lets customers see other accounts, but it worked with a screen scraping function and not an open banking one.

Researchers say open banking services will rise in popularity, with 33 million expected to sign up by 2022. The service isn’t well-known, though. A survey by PwC showed that out of 2,000 people asked, only one in four had ever heard of open banking, and only one in five knew what it meant.

Lloyd’s has been making a big digital push lately. In December, the company announced it might ban insurance brokers who refuse to digitize their businesses in 2019.

The company revealed that starting next year, “Each syndicate will be required to have written no less than 40 percent of its risks using a recognized electronic placement system, with the target increasing to 50 percent in Q2. A quote target will also be introduced in Q2 2019, and all targets will now apply to both lead and follow business.”

Lloyd’s added that brokers will also be required to connect to a recognized electronic placement platform by June 1, 2019. If a broker fails to comply, the bank said “it would be open to the board, depending on the circumstances of the case, to disapply the requirement, allow further time for compliance or to deregister the broker as a Lloyd’s broker.”