What do you think when you hear about open banking? A bank with no door? Or opening your bank account so everyone can see inside of it?

Joking apart, it does not refer to any invasion of your privacy. Actually, it is bringing countless benefits to everyone who uses banking services. You’ve probably already benefited, even if you don’t know what it means.

Gone are the days when banks were the only institutions in which we could store and manage our money. Or pay bills, make transfers, acquire credit cards and loans and other types of banking transactions. If you’d like to understand how open banking is impacting your finances, keep reading this article to learn more about it.

With the rise of online and digital banks and other financial products, many people wonder how they work your money if they’re not a bank. Traditional banks carry the confidence of being institutions recognized and supported by the government, with specific regulations and solid legal structures.

So when online banking emerged, many people found themselves suspicious about its legitimacy. After all, it is a great responsibility to entrust your money to an institution. We don’t even like to imagine the damage that a scam can do to a family’s life. Losing all of your savings can cause problems that will cost the work of several generations to recover.

That’s where open banking brings the solution. It is an agreement between banks and fintechs to use the solid structure of banks with a more modern approach through APIs – application programming interfaces. With the use of software, digital ecosystems are created to transfer information from one institution to another.

Open banking has opened not just the bank system, but a new horizon of possibilities. But through the same open door where benefits come in, the disadvantages can also find their ways to sneak in. 

However, if the cons were more significant than the pros, this technology would not exist anymore.  But it is not just a reality but is giving us many benefits, with no loss in security. Let’s highlight some benefits and some disadvantages of open banking. 

Application programming interfaces are essential to make open banking sustainable. These applications are developed by fintechs and have high standards to be approved by bank partners.

They’re used to share data between banks and their partners, such as online accounts and other mobile apps and websites that would like to include financial transactions among their services. 

According to some websites that track which banks are using open banking, there are around 182 banks and account providers that use it. Almost every bank in the U.S. knows the relevance of improving APIs and using it to provide better financial services to their customers. 

Some waves we just can not stop. That’s the case with open banking. Financial institutions have two options: to get drowned by then or to learn how to drop and surf.

So, as clients crave better and modern ways to manage their own money, banks and credit unions get to roll up their sleeves and work on better banking solutions. 

The following list has some examples of banks and credit providers that use open banking:

And if you’d like to learn more about finances and technology, read the following post to learn about security tokens and utility tokens.