Open Banking is an initiative designed to help increase competition and innovation in the European marketplace and offer consumers more control of their finances and access to a wider choice of products and services by giving them the ability to share their financial information with authorised providers.
Open Banking is an optional service. If you don’t want to use it, then you can continue using our services as you do today. There is no need to opt out. However, if you do choose to use Open Banking, it will only work when you have given explicit consent to a Third Party Provider (TPP).
Third Party Providers are authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to provide Open Banking related activities. This could include accessing your Credit Card account information or making payments on your behalf. They can only do this if you have given them your explicit consent. An online retailer or a price comparison website can be examples of a TPP.
When shopping online, a TPP may sometimes ask you to give consent to share your account data with them, using an app or a website. This is a simple process that will access Creation Online Account Management (OAM) to verify your identity, so you'll need to be registered for OAM to be able to complete it. If you haven't registered for the OAM, you can do it here
Once you have decided to proceed, for security purposes you will be redirected to our secure service where you will need to enter your OAM username, password and a One-Time Passcode (OTP) sent to your mobile device or email* and confirm your consent. At this point we will run our own security checks to verify that the TPP requesting information is registered with the Open Banking directory. If the TPP has passed our security checks, we will share your account information with them. If the TPP is not registered, their information access request will be declined.
Please rest assured the TPP will not see any of your login details at any time.
*email will be available in the future
Once we have successfully completed our security checks, we will only share your information with the TPP you have given consent to. We will not share information with any entity that is not registered on the Open Banking Directory.
The data we have shared in the period whilst your consent was valid may be stored by the TPP – you should contact them to understand how they will treat it.
It's up to you how long you want to share your data. You can consent to allow a TPP to request your account information once - or you can leave your consent open for up to 90 days. The TPP will access your data in real-time, and the duration of your consent determines how long they can do it for. Once the consent period has ended, the TPP will need to ask for your consent again.
You can stop sharing your data with TPPs in your OAM. Once you have logged in, click on My Profile and scroll down to the Open Banking section under Account Settings. You can also stop sharing your data with most TPPs by logging into their service and revoking your authorisation.
Please note that after 90 days of sharing your data with a TPP all sharing will be stopped, and you might be requested to give consent to the TPP again via the same process as described above, if you so wish.
You can view your consents on your OAM profile by navigating to the "Open Banking" section. It will show you the TPPs who currently have access to your information and also allows you to revoke consents for any TPPs if you wish.
No - Open Banking is free, however some TPPs may charge you for additional services or products.
You can visit the Open Banking website