Webinar Transcript
Understanding Open Finance Platforms: Making the Right Choice for Your Organization
Ted Anastasi: All right, hello and welcome everyone, thanks for joining us today for our Understanding Open Finance Platforms: Making the Right Choice for Your Financial Institution webinar. My name is Ted Anastasi, I lead the growth team here at Akoya and I'm happy to be hosting the session today.
The conversation we will focus on today is exploring key insights from Altitude Consulting's Guide to Best Open Finance Platforms report, discussing opportunities and challenges organizations face within the ever-growing open finance landscape, and finally, how Akoya and Altitude's roles in this open finance space can provide value beyond compliance requirements.
Before we jump into the conversation, I just have a couple of logistical items for the group here. So, all the modules you see on your screen to the right-hand side are customizable. You can downsize, move them around, things along that line.
At the bottom of your screen, you'll see a module where you can download assets relevant to today's conversation, so please look at them. There's also a Q&A module. Questions can be submitted any time and questions will be anonymous. Out of our 45 minutes together today, we're holding about 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the session to answer the questions. And if we don't get to all the questions at the end, we'll include them in a follow-up email with a link to this webinar. We'll be making it available on a playback basis here. So, we're ready to go now. So now with that, allow me to introduce my co-host, Reuben Piryatinsky. Reuben is a seasoned veteran of the industry with over 20 years in financial services. He's launched four companies over the past 20 years. The first one at the youthful age of 17, which is great to see.
Now he serves as the CEO of Altitude Consulting, an open finance advisory and implementation firm. You know, thanks again Reuben for joining me today. It'd be great if you could expand a bit on Altitude's work in the open to finance space, please.
Reuben Piryatinsky: Thank you, Ted. It's amazing to be here. We at Altitude help drive the adoption of open finance in North America. We're working with financial institutions as well as under other industry players to help define open finance strategies to help divide monetization strategies as well as implement them and guide the full end-to-end implementation of those strategies.
Ted Anastasi: I appreciate that background there. I'm sure you're seeing a lot of acceleration in this space. You're going to hear me say consistently throughout today's session that open finance is here to stay. It's only accelerating. And we're seeing that. And based on what you're seeing, you're going to feel the same there. So, one thing we're hearing from financial institutions, the marketplace, and the conversation around, do I build? Do I buy? Do I partner for open finance? I know you touched upon these types of implementations in your report. So how do you suggest financial institutions weigh the three options again, buy, build, partner, and what do you see as the main opportunities and challenges to implement here?
Reuben Piryatinsky: Yeah, that's a great question. And perhaps we can chat about the report and what we've covered in the report. And from there, we'll get into the buy, build and partner question. The short of it is that throughout our work with financial institutions, we've been consistently asked questions about what open finance players exist in the market, what platforms exist, what are their capabilities.
And we often had to answer the same or remarkably similar questions. So, we've also conducted extensive research. And we've realized throughout that research that there are a lot of open findings platforms, but they're all behaving in diverse ways. They all have various kinds of capabilities. And at the same time, although there were some reports, there was other research on open finance platforms. There was none that went into in depth into explaining the differences between them. So, we've created this white paper to answer all these questions and illustrate the differences between the different platforms and how they behave. And one of them, one of the key considerations, one of the key elements that we've looked at in this report, is how different platforms handle the data in versus data out components of open finance. All right, so we can get more information from the report, but going back to your build versus buy question, how should an organization approach the build versus buy?
Well, there are three options, the way I see it. The first one is building an open finance platform. To build an open finance platform, the organization needs to make quite a big investment to build the API infrastructure, to build security, and to build consent flows. That gives it a lot of capability or rather control over various capabilities of the platform, over the developer experience, over the extensibility. But it is quiet, gives a high cost and possibly longer time to market. And all the maintenance of that platform should or is on the bank, on the organization itself.
When you partner with an open finance platform, such as Akoya, you have a potentially faster time to market, because a lot of these key capabilities are taken care of for you. The platform has consent management, developer experience, as well as standardized upgrades for both API standard updates for regulatory updates, such as Section 1033 requirements or any other requirements that are amended by regulators, that's handled for you. That's a good happy medium. Then the third approach, which is to fully buy, or we call it engage with a provider or with a core banking provider, is using their open finance APIs to get compliant, to be able to take part in the open finance ecosystem. This can get you the fastest time to market and potentially a lower cost, but it also gives you a more limited set of control on the capabilities, on the use cases that are provided, and the customization options. Usually, that's better for smaller financial institutions from the tail end of the market, and while the build approach is usually for organizations that are much larger, they're investing a large amount of money into their open finance program taking that approach.
Ted Anastasi: Interesting. When looking at your report there, it was great to see the global focus there. Interesting to see the choice that was out there in the different markets. And I always say choice is a good thing to those that are buying. The more choice that's out there, the more options you have, the more you can find a solution that's extremely specific to your unique operating environment. So good stuff there on a global basis. I really enjoyed it.
Thank you. Another thing I hear from financial institutions is like, why now? Their compliance deadlines are a few years out. You mentioned 1033, so it's a few years out from the stated deadlines. They're concerned with what could happen to those deadlines in the future. My opinion, and it's always been consistent with this, we can't stress enough the time is active now. I've said this before, I'll keep saying it again. Open finance is accelerating and accelerating here.
So open banking and open finance solutions are helpful to financial institutions and their customers for many reasons beyond compliance. So why wait? What's your take on this? Do financial institutions need to act now, build, buy now, or something solutions soon?
Reuben Piryatinsky:
Sure. So, the question is why now? Should financial institutions act now? We all know that there is some regulatory uncertainty in the US right now with regards to 1033 and the reorganization of the CFPB. I'd like to address that upfront to set the context for my answer. The fact is that 1033 became law on January 17th, 2025. So that was three days before the inauguration. And as of right now, it is a law. The compliance timelines still stand, and they start on April 1st, 2026, when the first wave of financial institutions needs to follow the regulation.
Although we've seen there's reorganization in the CFPB, we see that 1033 has not been contested. It's not, it hasn't been brought up as, for consideration for the Congressional Review Act or the CRA. And so, and that there's been bipartisan support for the regulation. So,
So, to address that upfront, there are timelines, and there's a complete set of requirements that is required of the financial industry. Now, so let's say an organization is not in the next, it has a compliance tier that's not for another year or two. What do we do? So, primarily, open finance is not a trivial exercise. Creating support for open finance APIs is not a trivial exercise. It can take up to 18 months and requires many changes throughout the organization. It's not just technology changes. There are other operational changes. There are security and risk and compliance changes that must be made.
So, it is important to start planning for them. It's important to start to create them, to at the very least understand what are the changes that are needed and to create a budget and the timeline to make them. Now, as you mentioned, Ted, you touched on multiple different considerations for why it's important to go ahead with open finance and not necessarily wait. The first one is, I'm sure most all of us know it, it's screen scraping, eliminating screen scraping. Right now, the practice of screen scraping is not secure. It violates banks terms and conditions, and there are no guardrails for accessing the data and for what purpose. So just the elimination of screen scraping itself can provide a lot of transparency into who's accessing consumer data, how consumers are, their permissioning and what's the purpose for this access. There are other benefits well beyond that. So, there are many use cases that are enabled by open finance, such as streamlined onboarding. So, what we've seen is that 42% of new accounts are never funded and that's a lost opportunity of leaving money on the table. And all that can be streamlined and improved through open finance capabilities. Also, consumers value seeing all your accounts in one place.
91% of consumers value that capability, and 72% of consumers would seek another bank if that's not supported. So, open finance is going from compliance into a competitive advantage and not having various capabilities will put an organization at a disadvantage. So, it is important to act now, it is important to understand the vision that your organization under open finance and how you're going to operate in this new world.
Ted Anastasi: I agree with everything you mentioned. You know, I've talked to hundreds of FIs or financial institutions during my time in Akoya, pre-1033, now post 1033, and I'm hearing some real consistent themes here all along. More of my customers are sharing their data with an ever-growing number of fintechs out there and embedded finance platforms. It's just accelerating as I continue to say here.
As a custodian and a fiduciary, my customer's account information, I as a financial institution need to focus on mitigating cyber and data privacy risks. You hit that rate on the head, Reuben, with comments on screen scraping there. Another theme we're hearing, open finance usage is accelerating even more with my late-stage millennial and Gen Z client base. So, it's just going, here we go. This is a rocket ship here going forward.
And because of all this, I need to solve this before something bad happens. I need to solution now and get a much more safe, secure and transparent way of sharing my data, putting use case data minimization in place here and allowing my customers to send their data where they want, when they want, again, just in a much more safe and secure matter. So, I think we're at one a lot of the same themes here, which is great.
So, you know, another question there for you, Reuben. In your report, Akoya is mentioned as one of the best open finance platforms. How do you see Akoya differentiating itself from the rest of the players out there in the market?
Reuben Piryatinsky: Yeah. There are a few ways in which Akoya differentiates itself. The first thing that I'd like to mention is that there are diverse types of capabilities, and I mentioned earlier, there are various kinds of ways in which open finance platforms meet data in versus data out requirements. So Okoya provides both data in and data out capabilities and it does both has extraordinarily strong support for both. So, it is classified in this quadrant called all-rounders. These are platforms that have both data in and data out capabilities, and that support an extensive set of use cases. Now, what really stood out to us with Akoya is that Akoya has been API based since inception.
So, Akoya's never relied on screen scraping in its business model. So, the entire experience is API-based, and when people use Akoya, they know that they're getting direct OAuth-based connections. Another is that Akoya does not store, view or resell consumer data.
So that again adds to the security aspects of the platform. A lot of extraordinarily strong data provider capabilities. So, Acquia contains a consent dashboard to show which applications are connected, which fintechs are connecting, which consumers they allowed, very fine-grained consent management, both for consumers and for the financial institution itself and, strong integration capabilities. So Akoya has key partnerships with core providers such as core banking providers, such as Jack Henry and Fiserv. So, integrations are coming out of the box for a lot of key players.
Ted Anastasi: I appreciate that. Thanks. Let me just spend a few minutes on Akoya here. You know, our focus is on making financial data sharing secure, reliable, and transparent to the customers. You mentioned 100% API based; OAuth based. That's really a core tenant of ours. We never see the data. We never store the data. We never see login credentials. It's just the way we've been stood up from day one as one of our core principles. You know, the best example of how we do that today is our open banking solution.
While this is an end-to-end solution and it can help financial institutions meet and maintain compliance, the value is found and its benefits beyond regulation here. We've been built with the customer and the consumer first in mind there, squarely in mind. Financial institutions using our platform can enable secure data connections, expand use cases you mentioned, like the funding of new or existing accounts and the banding area associated with them, we feel we've got a unique solution there to really remove friction from that whole process and have higher, higher success rates, which is great. We could build consumer trust here in the way we encourage both the recipient side of our network and the provider side to be transparent in the terms and conditions. get explicit consent here in the way information is shared and what's going to be done with that. The more you offer that transparency, the more trust you build there. And that comes down to us providing the visibility and control once that consent's done there with the ongoing permissioning dashboards and how we can power those views with the ability to make changes, add accounts, take accounts away, potentially revoke access really in a real time basis. It just gives trust and confidence there.
And then we're talking about driving revenue through insights, last bullet there to the bottom right. What I can see in there is a couple things. You know, with the financial data exchange and all the work they've done on best practices and sharing data, ensuring that the end app receiving that data is transparent to the organization, allows financial institutions to know exactly where their customer's data is going. and what level it's going and what kind of amount of activity that's going there, number of customers, how often it's going, things like that, will enable them to say, okay, that's great. I understand where my client's not doing much better. I understand where the end-to-date is going. I can better understand my clients so I can deliver more value. But a more recent grown use case that we're having here at Akoya is not only data providers or financial institutions want to give their data into the network.
But they also want to sit on the other side of the network. They want to receive information from held away account information for things like funding new accounts or just giving a broader insight of their customers' financial landscape, where they can better understand behaviors and potentially deepen their relationship with their customer, because they have a more holistic view. Which has been, again, something we're seeing a lot of acceleration in, which is open finance as it continues to evolve there. In addition, there, at its core, our open banking and finance are putting the hands, Platinum Services are putting the control back of the hands of our customers. As mentioned before, we're 100 percent API-based. We enable financial institution customers to authenticate, select accounts, and permission data to go.
And all this is without having login credentials shared or stored anywhere in the process. And that's a huge, huge win in this space from a cybersecurity standpoint. Consumers can have the peace of mind that their data is going to be used for the use case at hand. So again, the amount of data that's flown to the fintech, for example, is in line and in concert with the fintech that they're using.
And then again, a quiz data access network provides risk mitigation. Um, I can't emphasize this enough about the logging credentials. They're not available or part of the flow as someone permissions their data to flow from a financial institution up to a third priority.
I want to call out a couple of things about Akoya here, I mentioned it before, but I think it's really important because it's different than other data access sources out there that are in the marketplace today. Akoya does not see, store any information in any way. We are a transport layer, which means consumers can have peace of mind that their data is not potentially going to be misused in any way or sold.
It's just the way that we believe this open finance ecosystem should be done. Then furthermore, Akoya is primarily a B2B solution. Some of our financial institutions have chosen to expose the Akoya brand in the consent process and in the permissioning process. It's up to them. We don't require our brand to be visible in any way to the customer. Because of that,
The customer is doing business with a trusted FinTech. The customer is doing business with a trusted financial institution. We are facilitating the consent and data flow between those two without them having another brand inserted into that process where they don't know who that is. It causes
And we have a lot of configurability in this space. We think that's being well received by the marketplace. So just wanted to add those few soundbites there about Akoya. What we're doing out there in the marketplace is we continue to grow and expand.
So, with that said, you know, we do have time for questions here. And I do want to advance into the Q&A stage. And I'm glad to see some questions are being presented here. So, I'm going to play the facilitator here, Reuben. I'm going to take a couple of them, but I'm going to ask you also to jump in. So, one of the questions that came in, I'll read this for you, as well as for the audience. How have some financial institutions delivered these open finance solutions in a small incremental way? Have you seen financial institutions describe the benefits from a cost perspective? So maybe if you could highlight your experience there, that would be great. Reuben, please.
Reuben Piryatinsky: Yeah, absolutely. There are some very, there are some quick ones that can be obtained through open finance, and I've alluded to a little earlier in the conversation. So, capabilities such as streamlined account opening and fully end-to-end automated account opening. If you're, think of the last time that you've opened an account with a financial institution and think of the challenges that you've had or whether the account was ready to use right away, or did you wait a couple of days for clearance checks? Think about the next step, which was account funding and how easy or complicated that was.
These are basic capabilities, and they provide immediate value to a financial institution right up front. And they both can be accelerated, enhanced, and made more secure through open finance. As I mentioned, 42% of new accounts remain unfunded. And if you think of the cost to acquire a new customer, which can be several hundreds of dollars, these costs quickly add up. So that's one option. Another one that we've seen that is really resonating with consumers is seeing all their accounts in one place and being able to see the full financial picture. So that creates stickiness in the primary financial situation
And that also increases the increase in engagement, increases the usage of the primary bank. So, these are just two of the key use cases. So, these are data in use cases for bringing in third party data or external financial data into your bank. There are, of course, the data out use cases.
Ted Anastasi: And I'd like to cover that one as well. So, think of it as a financial institution, when you see that a consumer is connecting through a third-party app, through a fintech app, without open finance APIs, there's no clear indication as to what app is connecting and what purpose it's connecting for. So, the concern might be shopping around for a mortgage, let's say, for a different financial product. Now, with open finance APIs, there's transparency and there's clarity as to who is accessing, which app is accessing, what's the purpose for which it's accessing. And so, as a bank, you can now make a watch out for those connections and see if, let's say, Reuben is shopping around for a new mortgage.
I should have a conversation with Reuben and see what I can offer, what options I can offer Ruben for mortgages, and I can make him a better offer that will help him stay with our financial institution versus going somewhere else. So, all of these are very tangible. Thank you for that. Echo a couple other things here. Starting to see more activity in leveraging transaction history for underwriting purposes.
Think of near-prime, sub-prime, or think credit-fire, more specifically people where transaction history is showing that you have great financial hygiene will help you get access to more products and services. So, whether it be an embedded finance platform that's with a bank or the bank bringing that data in directly to the credit bureau on behalf of the bank bringing that data in, it certainly has been something we're seeing a growing trend in.
But to your latter point there about the financial landscape, the holistic view there, I was at a conference last month and I had a stat that really took me back. That's part of the reason I mentioned, or in conjunction with mentioning, mid to late-stage millennials and Gen-Z. On average, this population is doing business with 12 different financial institutions. That's on average. Some of the outliers are upwards to 20. And I'm like, I can't believe that. But as you think through that, I've got my digital wallets, my crypto accounts, a couple 401Ks by now, my student loan accounts, other loan accounts, and my credit cards, and my traditional checking savings or brokerage account.
You add all of those up, how am I going to manage my financial landscape? And to be able to either have a FinTech stood up helping you or more importantly, the bank standing up or the financial institution, I should say, standing up functionality and capabilities to allow them to bring that data in is a value add there.
Reuben Piryatinsky: Absolutely. Let me even add to that. On top of managing your financial landscape, the capability of managing your financial landscape is extremely important because, if you think about it, millennials and Gen Z are experiencing a big generational wealth transfer now. And I forgot the exact number, but it's in the billions of dollars that they are inheriting or beginning to grow their assets into in the aggregate. So being able to properly serve their needs as a financial institution, being able to provide all the capabilities and all the right user experienced o manage their finances and make it easy to do things is valuable. And not being able to do that on the other side is inevitably going to cause customer attrition. Millennials right now, and any demographic group, are expecting a similar leading product from Google, from Apple, from Amazon. It needs to be instant; it needs to be easy; it needs to be convenient. You need all your capabilities there in one place, on mobile, on desktop, wherever you are. And there needs to be value add because now AI is, the capabilities are a part of almost any application. So, banks really have to level up their game.
Ted Anastasi: Well said, well said. We are in this digital hyper-connected world. Data is going everywhere at the speed, and making it frictionless is so important. And I think we're doing an excellent job out there. And that's what APIs are all about, a labels app to happen frictionlessly. All right, another question here. When will we see capabilities expand beyond data sharing? For example, ability to place trades, retrieve statements, and tax docs. I'll start on that, Reuben, and please jump in.
I think we're already there on the statements and tax docs. That's being made available. We're seeing use cases in the tax planning preparation space that Akoya is powering, where we're delivering both the APIs for the tax information, for example, the specific tax fields to auto-populate into tax planning preparation platforms, as well as to accounting firms who are doing this work on behalf of SMBs and even commercial clients in addition to your consumer. They also want the statement though, it's interesting. I've got the APIs, you've got it all, and you can trust that it's coming through timely and accurately, but I still want the statement to come along with it. So, we have the ability to deliver that. So that's something that we're seeing accelerating, especially with financial institutions that are sunsetting OFX servers. That is happening, we are seeing that more and more today that legacy technology has been out there the last couple of decades, there's better ways to do it. And the decommissioning of these servers is happening, and people are moving those connections and OFX servers both for tax and wealth management onto the API. So, I would say that's there. Trading. Not quite seeing that in the consumer permission space quite yet. Certainly, in the institutional space, that's been there for a long time. The ability to push trades from OMSs or other portfolio kind of platforms is definitely something that's been out there. But now we're seeing more and more fintechs being stood up with the notion and the request to push retailer consumer trades back up through data access networks to the clearing and custody platform. And so, I think Akoya is looking at that to be transparent. We are not quite there yet, but certainly on our near-term roadmap. Ruben, anything to add to that question or those comments?
Reuben Piryatinsky: I would say that's a very comprehensive answer. I am going to answer it from a standards perspective. FDX, which was recently recognized by the CFPB as approved standard setting body for in the US is has the already has a lot of data types that are beyond just the standard open banking data types and there's it has the ambitions to expand it's actually ever extending its data types and support for other and for other additional financial products. If we look at global jurisdictions, Australia, for example, is a good example, which where they have adopted open data. So, which means that they start from open banking and open finance data and the consumer data rights regulation, CBR has energy data, utilities data, telecom data, and so on. So, this is We're still a few years away from that in North America, but it is coming, and it is something that's going to be available on a much wider basis.
Ted Anastasi: I appreciate that insight there. All right, questions are coming in. This is great, so please keep them coming. Next one up, what are the top use cases Akoya help to facilitate or enhance for their data recipients? What role does Akoya play to enrich or enhance these use cases? I'd say top of mind, like what we're seeing a lot of activity in now is peer-to-peer or pay-by-back use cases here, and helping make sure that the receiving side, or really both sides of the transaction, are who they say they are. The money is there to facilitate the use case. We are checking that the customer is the customer, and you have peace of mind. And if I'm going to jump from an embedded finance, you know, pay by bank fintech, then jump to a financial institution. I'll authenticate with that financial institution as I do today. You can have comfort that that person is who they say they are.
Furthermore, we know that financial institutions do some of the best KYC out there. So, to return some of those customer attributes to allow you to do that, which then leads to what we call payment enablement. So, collection of account number, routing number to facilitate money movement or tokenization of that. We're seeing the next wave here in risk mitigation when it comes to removing account numbers. Mark, account number routing number from the marketplace and tokenizing that. We sit in the middle of that with partnership with the clearinghouse to help facilitate a turnkey solution for that space. So, a couple of soundbites there, Reuben, you mentioned the PFM use case and the data aggregation use case. We certainly sit in the middle of that and help with money movement there
Wealth management use case, I should say money movement, understanding your holdings there, your financial landscape. A wealth management use case, a little different, where we're helping financial advisors get a more holistic look at their clients. Portfolios as they're doing financial advisory work is something that we play with and sit in the middle with. From an enrichment standpoint, we have certain fintechs that say, "I want the data direct from the financial institution without you doing anything about it." Because I built my analytics and my special sauce, if you will, around it. So, I just want the raw data. And Akoya's enables as direct as you can get with the financial institution without having a direct agreement, a direct connection. Milliseconds of latency to pull the data back. So, we offer a lot of value there. But on the flip side, if you want some data normalization, data categorization, across all the financial institutions, the thousands of financial institutions that are data providers into the Akoya data access network. We can support that on the fly without going against our principle of never seeing data or storing data. It's a transport layer and milliseconds that the data passes through us, it's gone there. So that was a great question, thanks for that. Another one came in, this is an interesting one, is Akoya a competitor or an aggregator service provider like Plaid or Yodlee or does it integrate with these drivers?
We are an open finance platform for all players in the ecosystem. We offer choice, as I mentioned before, choice is always a good thing for the marketplace, and for someone looking for data access to financial institutions, you now have a different service model to choose from compared to one of an aggregator. It's really up to you what's the best solution for you. A shorter answer is yes, we have most of the aggregators on the platform consuming data through Akoya efficiently, meaning we are truly in-network.
They can make one agreement, one integration with us, and then they can access an ever-going number of data providers that are on the network there. Great. I don't know if you have anything to add to your study and all the analysis you did on that one.
Reuben Piryatinsky: Yeah, that's a very comprehensive answer Ted.
Ted Anastasi: Thank you for that. All right. What else? Let's see.
How about Reuben, another one for you that's come in. Let's see. Many banks and credit unions already have legacy systems in place. What's the biggest technical challenges when integrating open finance platforms?
Reuben Piryatinsky: We see a few of them. We see getting access to the data from those legacy systems through modern APIs, through REST APIs, and also getting this access in real time or near real time fashion. That's extremely important. And that's one of the things that we see organizations sometimes struggle with. Another one is getting all of the data elements in place. So, for example, 1033 requires some specific data elements beyond account data. It requires terms and conditions, account terms and conditions that were never available before through APIs. They require even two years of data, which are not trivial to get from legacy systems. So being able to build those layers of access on top of the legacy systems and making sure that they work in a very performant low latency way is a major challenge. Another one is handling large volumes of requests, so to the same point that these layers and data infrastructure needs to be very performant and needs to be able to handle the traffic that's required, and also throttling traffic. So that's important. And the final one, I would say, is cloud migration. So, a lot of legacy systems cannot be migrated to the cloud, such as mainframe systems. And in that case, having interoperability with cloud-enabled solutions with cloud components and doing that in a secure and seamless way is another challenge that we see. and that we actually help organizations with.
Ted Anastasi: Great. Thanks for that. All right. I think we're ready about time. There're a few other questions in there that we're not going to get to just because I want to be respectful of people's time. So that would be it. We want to thank everyone for your time and especially the questions. Again, if we didn't get to your question today, we'll follow up with that. Please check out the assets available in the modules.
Reuben, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us today. It's great to have you here. Both of us, Reuben and I welcome the opportunity to connect about our respective organizations. Please do reach out to us. Our contact information is below. Take care, everyone.
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