The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has confirmed the successful completion of the final Roadmap for Open Banking, paving the way for the future of open finance.
The project reached its conclusion as the last banking providers—Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland, and Allied Irish Bank—fulfilled all their Roadmap obligations, which include the implementation of variable recurring payments (VRPs) for sweeping.
This achievement means that all nine banking providers mandated by the CMA under the Retail Banking Market Investigation Order have now successfully completed the Roadmap and the necessary functionalities to provide a full range of open banking payment and account information services.
The open banking ecosystem is experiencing significant growth, with 11.32 million users recorded in July, reflecting a 12% increase from the previous month. The ecosystem is now valued at over £4 billion. In terms of transactions, 19.54 million payments were made in July, of which VRPs for sweeping accounted for 2.45 million—an impressive growth rate of 23.9%.
This milestone coincides with upcoming plans for a new Digital Information and Smart Data Bill, which is anticipated to broaden the ecosystem to facilitate data sharing across energy, telecommunications, transport, and retail sectors.
Henk Van Hulle, CEO of OBL, remarked, “The rollout of sweeping functionality across all the CMA9 is a crucial step in extending the benefits of open banking to a broader range of customers. As we look ahead, the next exciting chapter will involve exploring the potential of commercial VRPs, which have the capacity to revolutionise the way businesses manage payments.”