The FCA sprints towards open finance future, outlines priorities for 2026

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has released the outcomes of its Open Finance Sprint, which hosted representatives from the financial services industry, regulators and technology experts on March 27-28. It was part of the regulator’s plans for a smart data framework from 2026.

A ‘sprint’, in the world of agile workflow management, is a short, time-boxed period — typically one to four weeks — during which a development team works on a specific set of tasks to achieve defined goals. 

The Open Finance Sprint was part of the FCA’s Strategy 2025 to support growth, help consumers, combat financial crime, and be a smarter regulator. However, the FCA said the report summarises the outputs of the sprint and “is not an FCA view”.

More than 110 stakeholders participated in March’s event, aiming to develop ideas for practical data-sharing use cases in the key areas of: financial wellbeing; financial growth; financial resilience; and enhanced consumer empowerment through digital verification.

According to Ghela Boskovich, head of Europe, regional director at the Financial Data and Technology Association (FDATA) and FCA advisory board member, these types of activities are “a chance for regulators to ‘touch grass’ and crowdsource their learning and understanding of the challenges of building real-world commercial solutions”. 

It also reduces complaints against the regulator “for not paying attention to what the market wants or will bear”, she noted. 

Shared vision

The March sprint’s objectives were to generate a shared vision of the building blocks of open finance while ensuring consumer protection, benefits and enhanced data security protocols. This included examining data infrastructure; the impact and opportunities of new technology; the roles of different stakeholders; and the potential commercial models that could be applied to various use cases. 

Participants said data should be available, portable across sectors, and standardised to improve trust and drive growth, with strong traceability frameworks in place. 

From a technology perspective, the sprint highlighted enhanced common application programming interfaces (APIs) standards; transparent consent mechanisms; trust and accountability frameworks; and interoperability capabilities. There was also a strong consensus on the beneficial potential of integrating AI-driven analysis, agentic AI, and robust digital identity verification solutions.  

Boskovich notes that an open finance roadmap should be grounded in real-world demand and projected adoption. 

“The roadmap is a blend of outcome identification, technical milestones and commercial model validation, which all align with real-world demand and utility,” she adds. “We’ve built some functionality in open banking that still has no adoption because real-world demand does not exist.”

Emphasis on collaboration

However, the need for collaboration across the open finance ecosystem also played a significant role during the event. Participants emphasised that each use case should be underpinned by sustainable and inclusive commercial models, featuring aligned incentives, flexible revenue-sharing arrangements, and value distributed across all actors in the open finance ecosystem.  

In light of this, participants considered US banking giant JP Morgan‘s plans to charge fintech companies for the use of their customer banking data as taking advantage of deregulation initiatives brought on by the shrinking of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). 

One “controversial” issue is that the industry wants to find a position where data users can adequately compensate data holders, said Ciaran O’Malley, enterprise commercial director, UK at Airwallex, which provides multi-currency online business accounts. “I just think it’s nonsense,” he added.

The issue is that the value of the data — namely current account payments data in the UK — is “quite low”. However, when fintech companies start looking for data related to mortgages, insurance or taxes, that data suddenly becomes expensive, he said.

“I do not think we can get to a place that the FCA is trying to do where everyone is happy that the people using data are paying the right values for people who hold the data,” says O’Malley. “Then it becomes a political choice, and political choices can go either way: do we favour existing interests or do we favour new interests?”

He said the longer the industry deliberates over these choices, the more those choices are delayed. 

“I’m prepared to be agnostic on that view,” he added. “I’m prepared for a government to say, ‘You know what, we prefer banks, and that’s it, and we’re going to kill this.” 

Boscovich said delivery always takes longer than design, especially when clarity on funding infrastructure and a view on returns on that investment are not yet evident: “We’ve seen how long it’s taken to deliver open banking, and that is a mandatory initiative that still has yet to arrive at a commercially sustainable model.”

“Open finance is inevitable, of that I have no doubt,” she added. “How long it takes to deliver is a very different question. It is highly ambitious to achieve full delivery of open finance by 2030, when we will only see what the long-term regulatory framework looks like in early 2026, with the whole of market being included in the initiative, not just the nine big banks to coordinate.”

Smart data accelerator

Also announced as part of the Sprint outcomes paper, the FCA is planning to create an accelerator to support the transition to open finance and the smart data economy. This will test high-impact use cases and conduct foundational research into technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and cloud computing.

The FCA says the smart data accelerator will “drive progress on open finance” as the UK government plans to outline an open finance roadmap by March 2026. This roadmap, in conjunction with the Department for Business and Trade’s smart data strategy, aims to establish a new direction for data sharing across financial services and the broader economy.   

Boskovich said that while the accelerator can be useful “if done right”, details are “light”on how it will work “when it requires multiple regulators to align on truly cross-sectoral smart data use cases”.

This would mean getting Ofgem ( Office of Gas and Electricity Markets), Ofcom (the Office of Communications), Ofwat (Water Services Regulation Authority), the Department of Transportation, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Trading Standards all to agree having the FCA lead on assessing cross-sector smart data solutions, she said.

However, she added: “I think it’s a great micro-focused sandbox that would logically feed into a more macro-oriented cross-sector sandbox.”

Alongside its roadmap for open finance, the FCA will publish a summary of key findings of commissioned research to understand the foundations, opportunities and barriers to the development of open finance in the UK, and research on the impact of evolving technology on open finance.