Open banking in the UK has reached 6 million users, adding another million in under four months.

The stats were revealed by Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) head of stakeholder engagement Constanza Castro Feijóo at AltFi’s Open Banking Forum 2022.

“We want to support seeing harmony across the different sectors, and open banking has set the foundations for this,” she said at the event.

“The ideal scenario would be for an individual to see all their finances in one place, all their consent in one place and not have to redo all your consent.”

In addition, open banking payments are growing 500% year on year. May 2022 saw businesses and consumers make 5m open banking-driven payments.

The open banking community also made a record 1 billion API calls during May 2022.

With a focus on open-source technology, transparency, and privacy over user data, open banking helps customers securely share their financial data between organisations. This gives them greater freedom over how they manage their money and makes transfers between different service providers easier.

This in turn helps the banking industry adopt new technology, boosting innovation and protecting consumers.

Open banking has helped pave the way for many of current fintechs by giving them access to banking infrastructure and letting them work along established institutions.

2022 has been a landmark year for open banking. The standards have seen significant growth since they were introduced on January 13th, 2018, when the Payments Services Directive 2 (PSD2) came into force.

Recommended

• What can businesses learn from Google’s post-mortem culture?
• Will TikTok-Oracle deal assuage Chinese data concerns?
• New trial sees Scots pupils getting drone delivered school dinners

Furthermore, open banking reached 5m users less than four months ago, demonstrating the speed at which it is being adopted.

It had previously taken 10 months to go from 1m users to 2m in 2020.

In part, the recent growth was driven after HMRC became the world’s first government department to adopt the standards. By adding a ‘pay by bank‘ option to its annual self-assessment process, the number of open payments grew 19.3% from December 2021 to January 2022.

Commenting on the growth of open banking, Martin Wilson, CEO of Digital Identity Net, said: “When open banking was first introduced back in 2018, uptake was initially slow. But in recent months, momentum has been growing and open banking has now reached a record 6 million people, just four months after reaching 5 million.

“In the last month alone, there were 5 million open banking payments, and they are growing at a rate of 500% year on year.

“Banks, businesses and the public sector are increasingly exploring more ambitious and creative solutions that open banking fosters, driving this growth. Amazon is using it to revolutionise card payments, the FCA has reformulated the process of reauthentication and HMRC has taken billions in tax through open banking.”

He added: “It’s important that banks, businesses, fintechs and government continue this creative collaboration to ensure we capitalise on this momentum. By working together, we can drive wider consumer adoption and acceptance of open banking services, unlocking its potential to transform a wide range of services in the UK.”

Get the latest news from DIGIT direct to your inbox

Our newsletter covers the latest technology and IT news from Scotland and beyond, as well as in-depth features and exclusive interviews with leading figures and rising stars.

To subscribe, click here.