Welcome, we are back in Amsterdam for Money 2020 Europe, and I am honored to be joined by Martijn Bos, who is the head of European policy at Plaid.
Martin, thank you so much for joining us.
You're very welcome, thanks for having me.
So it's just kicked off here, we haven't had that many speakers yet, but tell me what's, what's most exciting for you at Money 2020 this year?
I mean, you're right, it's we haven't had a chance to see a lot of content yet, but what always draws me here is the convening power of Money 2020 itself, um, the ability to come together with industry and sort of decide together on, you know, what's the next thing that we need to all coalesce around, and I think this year will be no surprise to anybody, and least of all yourselves probably as AI is the topic du jour.
What is that word?
I haven't yet.
Depends on who you ask, I think.
But we're looking at it as sort of a system where where technology can make automated inferences for for financial decisions or ways to interpret underlying data, things like that, right, right, definitely.
And so, you know, played, broadly speaking, mostly focused in America.
You're head of European policy.
What does, what does play look like in Europe today?
Where is the growth?
Where are you guys seeing the most activity.
So in Europe open banking is regulated, has been regulated, we're licensed.
That in itself is a fundamental difference in how open banking works in the US versus versus Europe.
What we see is that the UK is really taking the forefront and has done for a number of years in terms of open banking development.
Um, they have OBIE, they have an administrative body that helps entire industry coalesce around what we need to achieve there.
Consumer uptake in the UK is very strong as well.
We see that growing in Europe as well.
Really excited to see what PS3 and the PSR will bring in terms of You know, a level playing field when it comes to the way we interact with banks and other FIs in the European Union.
So there's good things ahead.
Yes, certainly it sounds like a very exciting and active time, but of course, as you mentioned, AI is the key topic here.
There is a lot of talk that people will feel like.
Banking or retail banking without AI will soon feel outdated.
What are you guys seeing in Europe with that appetite from the consumer perspective?
People always blame Europe for being slow to take on new technologies or to adopt things like that, but what we've seen from research we've conducted, and there's more research that we're working on that's coming out soon.
That that uptake is roughly equal to in the United States the way that consumers have embraced the language models and the chats that they can interact with, that's sort of on par.
So what I think there is you're going to see a lot of people who are suddenly much more informed about their financial lives and well-being and therefore present a much more mature customer base to banks and fintechs who in turn will.
Benefit from a more mature customer and also some, you know, a bigger ecosystem to work with, I think, yeah, and, and you know, the, the role that FinTech before the AI AI wave has been played in in our lives has already been huge.
Um, tell us about your very new exciting um uh announcement.
A few weeks ago, I know, I know, I know, we're really getting in the weeds there.
So we, we, we've worked with chat GPT, so OpenAI and Perplexity to provide holistic financial dashboards so people can connect through user permission, data connections, their bank accounts to these chats, and what that does is it gives contextual.
Information that people can use to come to conclusions around their financial lives, whereas before you might just be asking sort of general questions to chat GPT or perplexity about what is this or what is a good investment, is this rate of return good for me, and now those machines can do that with the data that you put in, so you've got a really bespoke answer and that in turn yields a consumer that is much more fit to deal with financial institutions and the financial sector at large.
It's so exciting to chat GPT and it's so exciting for you guys to have been, um, you know, so central to to that movement.
Um, so we talked a little bit about open banking in Europe and let's take that one step further into open finance.
Um, what, what are you guys seeing as the kind of key, you know, thing that unlocks open finance here in Europe and sort of drives that forward as we saw with open banking that point.
Yeah, totally.
So again in Europe being regulation led, that's one pillar I'll talk a little bit about and then the other is just the need to broaden and deepen access in the financial sector.
So you need broader account types that consumers can permission for their data and then within those broadened account types we want to see deeper access points.
So where we see today just very sort of high level account name, balance transactions, there's a lot of other data in there that we can use to come to an open finance conclusion for someone that goes beyond what we can do with open banking today.
And in the UK we've got the Data Access and Usage Act coming into force, and there will be a statutory instrument later this year that will help us understand what the initial open finance use cases are going to be.
And then in the EU we've got FDA, Financial Information Data Act, that's going a little bit all over the place, so we don't know yet where that's going to land.
But I think in general all across Europe we're seeing this momentum going in the right direction.
And thank you for highlighting one piece of legislation that is doing well in Britain.
It's very exciting, very exciting to hear about the good news sometimes.
Um, so that point about the UK, I mean, with open banking, there was a serious Persian leading force coming out of the UK that just sort of fundamentally moved the finance sector along into open banking.
Um, with open finance, especially across the EU, what do you think the key learnings are and what, where do you think the EU is being influenced by what's going on in the UK?
Uh, I mean they'll probably deny it, but I think they are playing, paying close attention to sort of this administrative role that OBIE played to get open banking off the ground, and now we look at the future entity which is the successor of the OBIE in the UK, um, and what that looks like under open finance, so.
I think what they did well in the EU is following on from seeing that fragmented landscape and how well the UK tackled that was introducing a split level regulation, right?
So you've got PSD 3, the directive implementing open banking in the EU, and then we've got the Payment Services regulation which has direct effect on the member states, meaning that they don't have much choice in how they administer, enforce.
And let open banking and finance flourish in in those member states.
So that's something that I think they've learned from across the hunt and uh yeah, well, it's very important as suppose as finance becomes more and more digitalized to see everyone like building on that cohesion.
And, and with a stewardship, uh, that's very important.
But, um, let's talk about that digitalized moment.
What do you think the impact of AI moving with open finance is, and, um, are you seeing the conversations move with both of these things in mind?
I mean, absolutely, as I mentioned before, the ability for consumers to now access and infer information from their own financial data allows for them to engage with banks and fintechs in a way that they've never been able to before.
It also allows for open banking to play a much bigger role in that network of, of moving that information between the banks, the, the chat, and the financial institution, and then layering everything we do on top of that in terms of fraud prevention and.
AML prevention, things like that.
So the holistic web we're spinning together with this new technology is sort of transformational in our sector, and it's very exciting because it goes all the way from the consumer, how they behave, how they move all the way through to changing business models, competition, a whole new landscape.
Well, thank you so much for joining us.
I really hope you enjoy the rest of the conference and that we see some great conversation.
Thank you very much for having me.
I enjoyed it.
