New report from Whitecap Consulting highlights Open Finance opportunities for small businesses
At our recent Open Banking Summit, attendees got a brief overview of an upcoming report from Whitecap Consulting. The report, published today, has found that Open Finance has significant potential to support small businesses and help them tackle five of their biggest challenges: cashflow, finance, late payments, winning new customers, and financial business administration.
Published by Whitecap Consulting, a strategy consultancy, and supported by Intuit, the global financial technology platform and owner of QuickBooks, the report analyses the potential future impact of smart data via the development of Open Finance, a term which is widely accepted as referring to the expansion beyond Open Banking into a wider range of financial products and services.
The research conducted for the report included interviews with 35 industry experts and small businesses, and concludes that Open Finance could deliver considerably enhanced benefits to small businesses in comparison to what they currently experience from Open Banking. For each of the five small business challenges, the new report analyses depth of the issue for small businesses, the impact Open Banking has had to date, and the potential future impact of Open Finance. Additionally, the report identifies the datasets that are likely to be required within the scope of Open Finance and provides example use cases.
The report concludes that in order to unlock the opportunities offered by Open Finance, there are three key areas of consideration for policymakers:
- Support of small businesses should be an area of specific focus in the development of Open Finance framework, and innovation and competition can be improved by participation, data-sharing, the development of a roadmap, and an educational campaign.
- A number of issues will need to be addressed to unlock the opportunities that Open Finance can present, including the fuller adoption of Open Banking, development of a regulatory framework, clarity on data ownership and sharing, and the design of an effective commercial model.
- Developing an effective Open Finance framework could help small businesses address the key challenges they face, which could deliver significant benefits in terms of competitiveness and efficiency.
Julian Wells, Director and Financial Services & FinTech Lead at Whitecap Consulting, said:
“Open Finance has been a hotly debated topic in the financial services sector for some time now, with considerable focus placed on the potential implications for banks, financial services providers, FinTech firms, and policy makers. A group that has not been prominently represented in these debates is small businesses, but 99.2% of the UK’s companies are small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, employing 12.9 million people. Small businesses have undoubtedly benefited from Open Banking and other data related technology developments, but we have found that Open Finance represents a bigger and broader opportunity to benefit these firms.“
You can read the report in full by clicking here.
