Retail banking regulations hit UK with the potential of a ‘Big Bang’ moment

The UK banking sector is at the beginning of a journey that has the potential to force financial firms to offer more services and to change the way people bank. Two separate, but closely linked, regulations are about to come into force. Both are designed to inject competition into the banking sector, through the use of technology and data. On 13 January, the UK will see the arrival of the second version of the EU’s Payment Services Directive (PSD2) as well as the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) rules for open banking. Both regulations force banks to be capable of providing third-party financial services suppliers access to customer data, if the customer agrees, via application programming interfaces (APIs).