Intelliflo has launched Open Banking to all customers, enabling them to provide their clients with a holistic view of their entire financial portfolio in one secure place.

Open Banking provides financial and mortgage advisers with a better and more realistic understanding of their clients’ incomings and outgoings to support financial planning. It assists the accuracy of the fact find process and helps streamline it to become more efficient. Furthermore, data provided by Open Banking helps advisers get to know the spending habits of their client and encourages deeper collaboration.¹ Three weeks since launching Open Banking, Intelliflo’s customers have already identified approximately £20 million of held away assets.

Advisers’ clients can link their current accounts, credit cards and savings accounts² to the Personal Finance Portal (PFP) to see all of their finances in one place and set monthly spending budgets. Clients will be able to see transaction and account history of any account added, providing an analysis of spending patterns over different time frames that they can categorise themselves³.

Nick Eatock, CEO of Intelliflo, comments: “Financial planning involves more than just advising on investment and mortgage products, it takes in to account a number of factors that contribute towards a client meeting their short and long term goals. Open Banking technology gives advisers the ability to assess their clients’ entire financial portfolio and provide holistic advice based on accurate data. This technology is revolutionising the financial services industry, delivering new products that enable people to better manage their money. As the number of consumers using Open Banking through money management apps is on the rise, and the quality of this experience is improving, we’re pleased to be bringing this into the financial planning process.    

“Since we announced our plans to launch Open Banking at our Change the Game conference last year, holistic financial planning has become more important than ever. As we enter a recession, many will be relying on their adviser to keep their finances on track to meet their long term goals. We look forward to developing this functionality even further with plans already in place to incorporate new features.”

Intelliflo is registered with the FCA as an Account Integration Service Provider (AISP) which means that its Personal Finance Portal can connect clients with their banking account details. Linking accounts to PFP is quick, secure and done via the account providers own platform, providing an authentication journey the user will be familiar with.

Since adopting the Open Banking technology through Intelliflo, Will Palmer, Director & Financial Planner at Ethos Financial Solutions, adds: “Open Banking certainly makes the portfolio much more relevant. Many people have accounts with more than one bank, so having the information in one place makes it much easier to check balances, transactions and total spending patterns. It’s fantastic that the information also downloads automatically rather than re-synching with the bank.”

¹ Full list of features for advisers:

• Open Banking provides advisers with accurate data which will improve and streamline their fact find.
• Open Banking gives advisers access to client account information, which is traditionally hard to get to, including held away assets they might not know about.
• Clients' account balances are updated daily so information is always up-to-date and advisers can see if a client’s financial position changes.
• Soon clients will be able to use their transaction history to populate the income and expenditure section of the fact find. This means that advisers will get an incredibly accurate view of their incomings and outgoings.
• Open Banking enables a more holistic view for the adviser in terms of the FCA’s know your customer (KYC), which helps advisers to deliver good advice outcomes.  It is also a significant step forward in helping support the ongoing suitability requirements of Mifid II.

² Providers supported at launch

Intelliflo has initially integrated with the FCA's 'CMA9' who are the 9 largest UK banking providers according to the Competition and Markets Authority:

• Barclays Bank (Personal, Business, Wealth and Barclaycard)
• Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, MBNA and Halifax
• HSBC, First Direct and M&S Bank
• RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank
• Nationwide
• Santander
• AIB Group UK and First Trust
• Bank of Ireland (UK)

 Providers to be added next:

• TSB
• Tesco Bank
• Metro Bank
• American Express
• Clydesdale Bank

³  Full list of features for clients:

• Account balances and new transactions are automatically updated to PFP every day.
• Transactions are automatically categorized so clients can see a detailed view of how and where they spend their money.
• Clients can recategorize transactions singly or in groups to improve and personalise their data - our categorization engine also learns from recategorized transactions to improve accuracy.
• Graphs, filters and search functions allow the client to analyse their spending patterns over different time-frames.
• Clients can set PFP Insights to notify them of the categories they spend most in weekly and also when large transactions pass through their accounts.
• Clients can also set monthly budgets for spending in categories and track their progress against those budgets.
• Open Banking puts the client in control of their data, as permission must be given for the exact use of their data and consent must be renewed every 90 days.
• Open Banking means clients authenticate directly with their provider on screens which are familiar to them from their online banking – there’s no sharing of passwords or security information.