Standing up open finance is rarely the hard part anymore. Identifying and involving the right stakeholders early shapes better decisions and stronger design, long before problems have a chance to surface. That is the real test of treating open finance as a program instead of a project. It means building the right team from the outset, so the institution is positioned for success once the launch is behind it.
Before a financial institution takes a single technical step toward open finance, it's worth asking why any of this matters in the first place. Not to regulators or the technology team, but to the customers the institution exists to serve. Without them, there's no business.
Customers are already living in an open finance world, even if they don't call it that. They see it when they log into a budgeting app that pulls all their accounts into one place, when they apply for a loan and share their bank history instantly instead of hunting down statements, or when they connect their paycheck to a new savings tool. That's open finance in action. Customers are using it. They're benefiting from it. They just don't see the infrastructure powering it.
What they do notice is when it breaks: a connection that fails, account data that's gone stale, a security incident traced back to a third party that had stored their credentials somewhere it shouldn't have. That friction and that risk are often the result of a financial institution that hasn't yet made the commitment to a secure, API-driven open finance program.
An open finance initiative isn't just about building APIs, even though that's most of the visible work. It's about giving customers control over their own financial data, protecting them along the way, and delivering the kind of experience they expect from everything else in their financial lives. Get that framing right internally, and everything else that follows gets a lot easier.
Once that mission is set, the next thing to accept is that open finance can't live entirely inside technology. Treat it as an IT project, and an institution will likely end up rebuilding it as a business program later. That's a more expensive lesson to learn the hard way.
An open finance program needs people from across the organization involved from day one:
|
Function |
Role in the program |
|
Technology & Engineering |
Builds and integrates the APIs, but they can't do it in a vacuum. They need real requirements from the business, not specs handed down with no context. |
|
Compliance & Legal |
Need to be involved early. Agreements with data recipients, regulatory posture, data governance questions: all of that should be resolved before the first connection goes live. |
|
Risk |
Owns third-party risk management for data recipients, and it doesn't stop after launch. Who's accessing customer data, under what terms, and how is that being monitored over time? |
|
Product |
Decides what data gets shared, how that evolves, and which use cases the program supports. Whatever they decide ripples out to every other team. |
|
Customer Experience & UX |
Shapes how customers experience open finance: the consent screens, the authorization flow, the moment they decide whether to trust it or walk away. Get this wrong and adoption suffers. |
|
Customer Success & Relationship Management |
Manages the ongoing relationships with data recipients, the fintechs and apps on the other side of the connection. This doesn't end once the technical work is done; it's an ongoing relationship. |
|
Marketing |
Helps customers understand what open finance means for them, why it's safe, and how to use it. |
The financial institutions that get these teams talking to each other early are usually the ones whose programs stick around.
An initiative touching this many teams, with this many tradeoffs to navigate, needs someone senior driving it, or it won't hold together.
And not just a sponsor who signs off on a budget once and moves on. This needs someone senior enough to understand why open finance matters, make the case for it internally, and resolve disagreements across teams when priorities conflict, because they will.
The 70% of financial institutions that named open finance a strategic initiative in American Banker's 2026 State of Open Finance Adoption survey, sponsored by Akoya, didn't get there by accident. Behind that number are many organizations where someone on the leadership team recognized that open finance isn't just infrastructure. It's a way to grow revenue, deepen customer relationships, and deliver more value to the customers they serve.
Executive sponsorship also signals to partners, customers, and internal teams that open finance is a lasting commitment, not a pilot that will quietly fade away. It moves the program from an engineering task list to something the institution fully owns.
And the stakes keep rising. More than 130 million consumer accounts in the U.S. are now connected via an FDX defined API, up from 114 million just a year earlier, with no sign of slowing down as more institutions and use cases come online.
If that sponsorship doesn't exist yet, that's the first thing to go get. Everything else is harder without it.
Ready to build this out? Get a custom demo to see what a real open finance program looks like for your organization.