Twenty-five minutes on stage at Money 20/20 Europe. Four panellists. Some (polite) disagreement.
Louise Beaumont chaired the panel: Agnieszka Scott, Head of Smart Data, UK's Department of Business and Trade; Michael Salmony, CEO, Payment Innovation Consulting; and Todd Clyde, CEO, Token. Together, they decoded the topic at hand; 'Regulation as the edge in open finance'.
Three things came up again and again:
Regulators govern verticals, but open finance runs horizontally - which means the market has a key role in managing risk.
FiDA - the EU's flagship open finance regulation - is stalling. Can GDPR fill the void?
And the firms pulling ahead aren't waiting for the regulation to catch up. They're moving now.
There was pushback too. Whether B2B data is where the real open finance opportunity sits, rather than consumer payments. Whether the market can step up where regulation falls short. Whether FiDA is dead or just delayed.
Nobody agreed on everything. That's the point.
We're writing it all up. The promise vs the reality, the fault lines, and - more importantly - what firms should actually be doing about it.
The report drops next week. Watch this space.
