Mapping the Progress of Australian Banking APIs and Fintech

One of the sessions at the upcoming APIdays that I am most excited about is the open banking panel. Australia is almost on par with international efforts when it comes to banking and fintech APIs, and it is an exciting microcosm to look at when assessing how well the API advantage is being taken up by Australian businesses.

As I told Computerworld the other week, banking has come a long way in the API space and 2017 will continue to see a ramp up.

At APIdays next week, we will have a number of speakers discussing banking, fintech and APIs. Mark Pesce (host of This Week in Startups Australia) will keynote on how payments APIs provide the “golden carrots” driving digital transformation initiatives. Rhys Evans will talk about the advantages of opening bank data via APIs, and Jonathan Perkinson will walk us through the impact of blockchain on financial services.

And I’m really excited that industry analyst and key researcher of the APIdays annual banking APIs studies, Mark Boyd, will host an open banking panel. Panelists include:

• Rana Pereis, from Barclays, will share details of his leadership in the global banking group, particularly his efforts in helping leverage APIs to create new partnerships in Africa. Rana has helped drive the use of APIs to enable third party providers to assist non-banked small businesses to open and manage their bank accounts from their phones. He told the APIdays banking study last year that by offering a banking API, the Barclays platform helped small businesses to manage their finances in one place, “plus do their banking and that gets more businesses using our platform than we could if we tried to get the business to come to our bank in the first place.” In a market where small business is the largest growing sector, that’s a key competitive advantage as well as having huge ramifications on supporting previously financially excluded households.
• Jessica Ellerm from Tyro Payments will be able to discuss her API perspective as a fintech leader. One of her most recent blog posts (which should be essential reading for anyone involved in fintech, startups or banking in Australia), is a fascinating look at the sort of financial services that banks just aren’t responding to. She walks us through an example looking at the costs of having children and shares key bank account data points that a fintech startup could aggregate in an app to create a new type of service for young families looking at better financial management. It is this sort of green fields thinking that will propel fintech forward if banking APIs become available.
• I’m also excited that James Bligh from NAB will be on the panel. Last year in Melbourne, James spoke at APIdays about the work he was leading to build an API strategy at one of the big four banks. This year, he returns only a month after NAB opened up their open banking platform. Hearing how the strategy was launched and the early adoption since then will be a fascinating, realtime discussion to have at APIdays.
• And finally, our panel will include Richard Miller, Deloitte partner in payments advisory who is seeing first hand every day how banks, fintech and enterprise are moving towards adopting APIs to make payments frictionless and an entry point into more global financial management services. He will be able to share insights on whether Australia’s regulatory environment is heading in a similar direction to the UK and Europe, where making banking payments more open via APIs will be regulated next year, or whether APIs will be more of a savvy move by banking leaders who are looking two steps ahead, like it is playing out in the U.S and Canada.

For those not interested in banking and fintech, we will have two other concurrent streams. But even for businesses and enterprises without a payments or banking interest, what is happening in banking is a great example of how the ground is shifting in a whole range of industries and will be an insightful discussion with learnings that can be applied to any industry sector.

We look forward to sharing this panel with you. Don’t forget the registrations are still open. You can ensure your attendance now by registering at au.apidays.io