Happy New Year!

It’s the beginning of a new year. I hope all of you had a good start into the new year and are excited about 2019. What does the new year have in store for us? In the banking / FinTech space the release of APIs by banks will probably have the biggest impact in 2019. The RTS will finally force banks to provide APIs for their payment accounts.

But what will be the exact impact and what services will emerge? I have written about the impact of PSD2 a lot already, and personally, hope that we will finally see open banking growing. I don’t believe 2019 will be complete game-changer for open banking. Why would it, since most banks in most countries are already available via a third party API provider today. However, the mid and long term effect of APIs will still be tremendous, but we should not expect a drastic change in the next months. I am hoping that I do not have to read too many articles at the end of 2019 discussing the failure of PSD2 since there are thousands of new services available.

We should not forget that PSD2 is about giving control back to consumers over their financial data. New services will come and go, but the possibility to access this data is an important step itself. In the long run, I am optimistic and really hope that other industries will follow suit. But it will be hard fight nonetheless.

I am pretty excited about 2019 and hope you are too!