Now talk about a somewhat surprising headline. This posting appeared in Global Finance and perhaps what surprised me the most was that the summary conclusion is based on takeaways from a treasury management conference in Europe. Given that PSD2 (essentially the official launch of an open banking era across the EU) went live back in January 2018, certainly there is more to the story.
“Approximately 60% of treasurers believe PSD2 and open banking are not relevant to them, according to a live audience poll at Eurofinance’s International Treasury Management conference in Geneva on 27 September….The Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) went live on 13 January and promised to open up a new world of third-party payment and banking services to businesses and consumers that grant access to their bank account information.”
As it turns out, the major implementation efforts have taken place more in the UK than across all of the EU, since there is some wiggle time for the broader EU adoption. One would expect however, some more detailed understanding by regional treasurers of such a defining regulatory directive with broad implications (and a fair amount of publicity). We tend to think that this is because, generally speaking, PSD2 has been considered more of a consumer impact (retail banking and individual payment services) than on the corporate space. This is of course true to an extent due to the need to gain client approvals, and in corporate payments/banking things are always more complicated.
‘However, EuroFinance plenary session panelist Paul Misere, EMEA treasurer for Dutch medical technology company Medtronic, said that until he was asked to speak on a panel about PSD2, he’d never heard of it. “I had to Google it,” he said. “PSD2 and open banking is not a hot topic for a lot of multinationals. Treasurers need to have a dialogue with their banks about the opportunities open banking provides,” he added.’
The article goes on to point out many of the potential benefits to open banking from a corporate perspective, so obviously this will ramp up over time, and is certainly one reason why API usage is gathering such momentum in markets not under regulatory pressure around open banking, including the U.S. The view in most other markets is more from a competitive perspective, in that clients are expecting better services, so let’s use technology to get there.
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
