The question of open finance was also up for consultation. Some of the questions focused on the use of existing open finance services and how effective they are, like the use of payment initiation services to access payment accounts. Another aspect is to consider the expansion of open finance or other financial services data that respondents would like to be able to access via third-party providers, such as mortgages, savings, pension and insurance services.
As things stand, by law, third-party service providers only have access to certain customer data, but part of this consultation process was to seek feedback about whether to extend access rights to more customer data. According to the EU commission, open finance refers to third-party service providers’ access to (business and consumer) customer data held by financial sector intermediaries and other data holders for the purposes of providing a wide range of financial and information services. Could this consultation lead to the development of open finance under PSD3? This remains to be seen.
What we can say with certainty, for now, is that we are likely to see further details emerging over the possible extension of open finance from payment accounts to a wider range of financial services. This may be big in scope and could result in other EU legislative reforms for payments and finance.