An update on Open Banking

To ensure that you and your clients are fully up to speed with the tumultuous world of Open Banking, here’s an update on all the recent developments you may have missed.

The story so far

Over the last few months, we’ve been encouraging your clients to switch their bank feeds over to new Open Banking feeds. Our switch to Open Banking has been going well and we now have tens of thousands of users enjoying the benefits of these more reliable and secure bank feeds.

This switch has been driven by updates to the PSD2 legislation, which comes into effect on the 14th September and will mean that many of our existing third-party feeds (delivered by Yodlee) will no longer work. As such, we’re keen to move everyone on to our new Open Banking bank feeds.

We create each new Open Banking feed as soon as the relevant bank offers reliable ways to access the data through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Unfortunately, not all of the necessary APIs have been published or properly tested yet, so we’ve been unable to support certain banks and account types. Although the banks have been working hard to release these APIs, the 14th September deadline is less than a week away and some APIs are still not ready.

What’s changed?

Recognising the potential customer impact of this situation, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) recently announced an extension to the legislation change. This could allow some of our existing Yodlee feeds to continue working beyond 14th September.

The situation is fluid and there are still uncertainties about the availability and reliability of Open Banking bank feeds for some banks. There is also uncertainty surrounding which feeds will continue to be available through Yodlee.

Here at FreeAgent, we’re committed to ensuring the continuity of bank feeds for everyone who uses them. We will let all of your clients know about these changes and any future developments as the situation progresses in order to minimise disruption for you and for them.

So what does this mean for clients?

Here’s the situation as it currently stands:

• The vast majority of our Open Banking feeds are already live. We recommend that you encourage any clients who can already switch to do so as soon as possible.
• If a client’s Open Banking bank feed isn’t available yet, we’ll continue to offer Yodlee feeds where possible.
• If a client’s Yodlee feed stops working on 14th September - and many of them will - and there is no Open Banking feed available yet, they will need to manually upload bank statements for the time being.

In the long term, Open Banking undoubtedly presents a huge step forward in allowing customers to share data with applications like FreeAgent, but there are still some hurdles to overcome and we appreciate your patience while we tackle them.

We’ll continue to keep you and your clients posted with any updates we have, including news of when more Open Banking feeds become available.