Industry experts laid out their vision for the future of fintech partnerships and what this means for consumers at a breakfast event hosted by Yolt, the smart thinking money app. Attendees included Leon Muis, CBO at Yolt; Romi Savova, CEO at online pension manager PensionBee; and Peter Goodman, CEO of home insurance start-up Homelyfe by Aventus. Other industry experts present included Frank Jan Risseeuw, CEO at Yolt and Emma Byrne,Head of Communications at the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE).

Fintech collaboration

Yolt CBO, Leon Muis, began the discussion with a focus on the importance of collaboration between fintechs. He said that “The next 12 months will be shaped by users experimenting and creating their own financial ecosystem, mixing and matching the money apps and financial management tools they need. Ever-closer and more seamless in-app integration and collaboration between fintechs is making this easier and easier.”

Payments

Payments also proved to be a popular area of discussion and PensionBee’s CEO, Romi Savova, said that “This year will continue to be all about processing transactions using Open Banking. This is the natural next step for the initiative and, by this time next year, we will be discussing how to make payment transactions even better. Now that the big players in the industry are increasingly coming onboard, we should see an acceleration in the services that will benefit from Open Banking. As an industry, I see us moving from Open Banking to Open Finance and eventually to Open Data.”

Mass adoption

Peter Goodman, Homelyfe’s CEO, agreed that “The next 12 months will definitely place an emphasis on payments, but there is still a lot of work to be done on education. As money apps increase their utility for consumers, we will hopefully see more user case studies appear. When these are shared, I think more people will realise the benefits of Open Banking.”

Emma Byrne, Head of Communications at the OBIE, agreed that mass adoption won’t happen overnight and pointed out that “It won’t be big advertising campaigns alone which raise Open Banking’s profile. Instead what’s needed is for all the players within the Open Banking ecosystem to play their part in building not only awareness and adoption but also trust; ultimately resulting in consumers adopting innovative apps such as Yolt. When customers realise the benefits of these new innovative apps then they too will spread the word.”

The breakfast event marked the beginning of a series of exciting activities for Yolt as it launched its latest Open Banking initiative – Yolt for Business API – offering a single API that covers account information services (AIS) and payment initiation services (PIS), enabling businesses to benefit from the power of Open Banking. This was closely followed by the launch of Yolt Pay Beta, which has seen the money app invite its community to test the early version of its payment functionality. Finally, Yolt announced its most recent partnership with comparison platform MoneySuperMarket, in the first of its kind partner integration, enabling users to compare and switch energy providers all within the Yolt app