How a Data Mesh Facilitates Open Banking

Open banking shows signs of revolutionizing the financial world. In response to pressure from regulators, consumers, or both, banks around the world continue to adopt the central tenet of open banking: Make it easy for consumers to share their financial data with third-party service providers and allow those third parties to initiate transactions.

To meet this challenge, banks need to transition from sole owners of financial data and the customer relationship to partners in a new, distributed network of services. Instead of competing with other established banks, they now compete with fintech startups and other non-bank entities for consumer attention and the supply of key services.

Despite fundamental shifts in both the competition and the customer relationship, however, open banking offers a huge commercial opportunity, which we’ll look at more closely in this article. After all, banks still hold the most important currency in this changing landscape: trust.

Balancing data protection with data sharing

Established banks hold a special position in the financial system. Because they are long-standing, heavily regulated, and backed by government agencies that guarantee deposits (e.g., the FDIC in the United States), established banks are trusted by consumers over fintech startups when it comes to making their first forays into open banking.

A study by Mastercard of 4,000 U.S. and Canadian consumers found that the majority (55% and 53%, respectively) strongly trusted banks with their financial data. Only 32% of U.S. respondents and 19% of Canadians felt the same way about fintech startups.

This position of trust extends to the defensive and risk-averse stance of established banks when it comes to sharing customer data. Even when sharing data internally, these banks have strict, permission-based data access controls and risk-management practices. They also maintain extensive digital audit trails.

Open banking challenges these traditional data access practices, however, causing banks to move to a model where end customers are empowered to share their sensitive financial data with a growing number of third parties. Some open banking standards, such as Europe’s Payment Services Directive (PSD2), specifically promote informed consent data sharing, further underlining the shift to consumers as the ultimate stewards of their data.

At the same time, banks must comply with evolving global privacy laws, such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These laws add another layer of risk and complexity to data sharing, granting consumers (or “data subjects” in GDPR terms) the right to explicit consent before data is shared, the right to withdraw that consent, data portability rights, and the right to erasure of that data — the famed “right to be forgotten.”

In summary, banks are under pressure from regulators and consumers to make data more available, and customers now make the final decision about which third parties will receive that data.

Banks are also responsible for managing:

• Different levels of consent for different types of data

• The ability to redact certain sensitive fields in a data file, while still sharing the file

• Compliance with data privacy laws, including "the right to be forgotten"

The open opportunity for banks

In spite of the competition and added risks for established banks, open banking greatly expands the global market of customers, opens up new business models and services, and creates new ways to grow customer relationships.

In an open banking environment, banks can leverage best-of-breed services from third parties to bolster their core banking services and augment their online and mobile banking experiences.

Established banks can also create their own branded or “white label” services, like payment platforms, and offer them as services for others to use within the open banking ecosystem. For customers, the ability of third parties to get access to a true 360-degree view of their banking and payment relationships creates new insights that banks would not have been able to generate with just their own data.

Given the risks, and the huge potential rewards, how do banks satisfy the push and pull of data sharing and data protection? How do they systematically collect, organize, and publish the most relevant data from across the organization for third parties to consume?

Banks need a flexible data architecture that enables the deliberate collection and sharing of customer data both internally and externally, coupled with fine-grained access, traceability, and data privacy controls down to the individual field level. At the same time, this new approach must also provide a speed of development and flexibility that limits the cost of compliance with these new regulations and evolving open banking standards.

Rise of the data mesh

Open banking requires a fundamental change in a bank’s data infrastructure and its relationship with data. The technology underlying the relational databases and mainframes in use at many established banks was first developed in the 1970s. Conceived long before the cloud computing era, these technologies were never intended to support the demands of open banking, nor the volume, variety, and velocity of data that banks must deal with today.

Banks are overcoming these limitations and embracing open banking by remodeling their approach to data and by building a data mesh using a modern developer data platform.

What is a data mesh?

A data mesh is an architectural framework that helps banks decentralize their approach to sharing and governing data, while also enabling self-service consumption of that data. It achieves this by grouping a bank’s data into domains.

Each domain in a data mesh contains related data from across the bank. For example, a "consumer" domain may contain data about accounts, addresses, and relationship managers from across every department of the bank.

Each data domain is owned by a different internal stakeholder group or department within the bank, and these owners are responsible for collecting, cleansing, and distributing the data in their domain across the enterprise and to consumers. With open banking, domain owners are also responsible for sharing data to third parties.

This decentralized, end-to-end approach to data ownership encourages departments within the bank to adopt a “product-like” mentality toward the data within their domain, ensuring that it is maintained and made available like any other service or product they deliver. For this reason, the term data-as-a-product is synonymous with data mesh.

Data domain owners are also expected to:

• Create and maintain relevant reshaped copies of data, rather than pursue a single-source-of-truth or canonical model.

• Serve data by exposing data product APIs. This means doing the cleansing and curation of data as close as possible to the source, rather than moving data through complex data pipelines to multiple environments.

The successful implementation of a data mesh, and the adoption of a data-as-a-product culture, requires a fundamental understanding of localized data.

It also requires proper documentation, design, management, and, most important, flexibility, as in the ability to extend the internal data model. The flexibility of the document model is, therefore, critical for success.

Conclusion

Open banking holds great potential for the future of the customer experience, and will help established financial institutions meet the ever-evolving customer expectations. Facilitated by a data mesh, you can open new doors for responsible, efficient data sharing across your financial institution, and this increase in data transparency leads to better outcomes for your customers—and your bottom line.