Financial data no longer sits inside isolated accounts. Customers now expect connected, personalised experiences that move with them across banks, fintechs, merchants, and digital platforms. Open finance makes that possible by enabling secure, consent-based data sharing, helping institutions build a data-led customer journey that strengthens engagement, trust, and long-term relationships.
What is open finance?
Open finance extends the principles of open banking beyond payment accounts. With customer consent, it enables secure access to a broader range of financial data, including savings, investments, mortgages, pensions, insurance, and lending products through standardised APIs. The result is a more connected financial ecosystem where institutions can deliver experiences tailored to an individual's financial circumstances rather than isolated account activity.
Several factors continue to accelerate the adoption of open finance, including:
- Growing market competition and embedded finance: Financial services now appear wherever customers shop, travel, or manage their daily lives.
- Rising demand for personalisation: Customers increasingly expect recommendations and products that reflect their financial goals and behaviour.
- Maturing API technologies: Standardised interfaces simplify secure data exchange across financial ecosystems.
- Regulatory momentum: Many markets continue to expand data-sharing frameworks that promote innovation while protecting consumers.
- Responsible data governance: Strong consent management and transparent data practices help institutions earn and maintain customer trust.
The shift to open finance is fundamentally changing customer relationships. Instead of competing on products alone, financial institutions now compete on the quality, relevance, and timing of every interaction.
Open finance use cases for data-led customer journey
The value of open finance lies in turning consented financial data into timely, relevant customer experiences. When combined with strong customer analytics and segmentation, institutions can anticipate needs, simplify decision-making, and strengthen engagement across every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Simplifying payments and credit decisions
Connected financial data removes friction from everyday banking while improving lending outcomes. Examples include:
- Faster account-to-account payments with fewer manual steps
- More accurate affordability assessments using real-time financial information
- Credit decisions based on broader financial behaviour instead of limited historical records
- Personalised credit card recommendations that better match spending patterns and repayment capacity
Rather than relying on static snapshots, institutions gain a dynamic understanding of each customer's financial position.
Delivering personalised financial wellbeing
A richer financial profile enables institutions to move from reactive service to proactive guidance. With customer analytics and segmentation, organisations can:
- Recommend savings plans aligned with customer goals
- Identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary borrowing
- Deliver tailored budgeting and cash-flow insights
- Offer relevant financial products at the right moment in the customer journey
This creates a data-led customer journey where every interaction feels timely, contextual, and valuable.
Expanding financial inclusion
Traditional credit assessments often overlook individuals with limited borrowing history despite responsible financial behaviour. Open finance broadens access by:
- Incorporating multiple financial data sources into eligibility assessments
- Supporting fairer lending decisions
- Helping underserved customers access appropriate financial products
- Enabling institutions to serve new customer segments with greater confidence
For financial institutions, inclusion is not only a social objective. It also represents a sustainable opportunity to grow responsibly while improving long-term customer retention.
Building a successful open finance strategy requires secure data governance, consistent data categorisation, standardised data models, and seamless integration across complex partner ecosystems. With extensive global experience and finance transformation expertise, Infosys BPM helps financial institutions implement business process management solutions for financial services that support connected ecosystems, strengthen customer analytics and segmentation, and create a secure, data-led customer journey that improves customer experience.
Benefits of open finance
By expanding access to permissioned financial data, open finance creates measurable value across the financial ecosystem. Key benefits it offers include:
- Financial institutions strengthen relationships, improve risk models, accelerate onboarding, and streamline KYC through more complete customer information.
- Fintechs, businesses, and payment service providers innovate faster by building personalised products using permissioned financial data.
- Merchants reduce payment costs through account-to-account payments while improving customer engagement with personalised offers.
- Consumers gain greater control over their financial data and choose services that best match their needs.
- Broader data access supports financial inclusion, encourages healthy competition, and drives continuous innovation.
Going forward, open finance will increasingly connect banking, insurance, investments, pensions, and emerging digital ecosystems, making trusted data collaboration a competitive necessity rather than a differentiator.
Conclusion
The ability to create the greatest value from customer data will increasingly define the future of financial services. Open finance allows institutions to transform fragmented financial information into meaningful customer experiences that build trust over time. As ecosystems become more connected and customer expectations continue to rise, organisations that combine responsible data sharing with intelligent decision-making will be best positioned to deepen relationships, unlock new sources of growth, and redefine what customer loyalty looks like in modern finance.
Frequently asked questions
Open banking focuses on payment account data, while open finance extends secure, consent-based sharing across the full financial picture, including savings, investments, mortgages, pensions, insurance, and lending. The difference is breadth and depth of context: institutions see a customer's complete financial position rather than transactions from a single account type, enabling far more relevant products and guidance.
They are complementary, not the same. Open finance is the secure, consented sharing of financial data across institutions. Embedded finance is the delivery of financial products inside non-financial experiences, such as checkout lending or in-app insurance. Open finance often supplies the data that makes embedded finance relevant, but one governs data access and the other governs distribution.
The main risk is disintermediation. As data flows freely across banks, fintechs, and platforms, competitors can build more relevant experiences around a customer the incumbent no longer uniquely understands. Institutions that stay closed compete on products alone, while others compete on relevance and timing, gradually losing the primary relationship and the data advantage that sustains it.
Handled well, open finance can reduce fraud rather than increase it. Standardised APIs and explicit consent are more secure than screen-scraping, and richer financial context improves identity verification and affordability checks. The risk lies in weak consent management and governance, so strong authentication, permission controls, and transparent data practices are what keep expanded data sharing safe.
Consent is explicit, granular, and reversible. Customers authorise specific data types for specific purposes and can withdraw access at any time, so control stays with the individual. Institutions must maintain clear consent trails and transparent records of what is shared, with whom, and why, since auditable consent management is what regulators and customers expect.
Open banking focuses on payment account data, while open finance extends secure, consent-based sharing across the full financial picture, including savings, investments, mortgages, pensions, insurance, and lending. The difference is breadth and depth of context: institutions see a customer's complete financial position rather than transactions from a single account type, enabling far more relevant products and guidance.
They are complementary, not the same. Open finance is the secure, consented sharing of financial data across institutions. Embedded finance is the delivery of financial products inside non-financial experiences, such as checkout lending or in-app insurance. Open finance often supplies the data that makes embedded finance relevant, but one governs data access and the other governs distribution.
The main risk is disintermediation. As data flows freely across banks, fintechs, and platforms, competitors can build more relevant experiences around a customer the incumbent no longer uniquely understands. Institutions that stay closed compete on products alone, while others compete on relevance and timing, gradually losing the primary relationship and the data advantage that sustains it.
Handled well, open finance can reduce fraud rather than increase it. Standardised APIs and explicit consent are more secure than screen-scraping, and richer financial context improves identity verification and affordability checks. The risk lies in weak consent management and governance, so strong authentication, permission controls, and transparent data practices are what keep expanded data sharing safe.
Consent is explicit, granular, and reversible. Customers authorise specific data types for specific purposes and can withdraw access at any time, so control stays with the individual. Institutions must maintain clear consent trails and transparent records of what is shared, with whom, and why, since auditable consent management is what regulators and customers expect.
