Open X: What’s next after Open Finance?

Published on Dec 21 2022.

reading time 10 minutes reading

After Open Banking and Open Finance, a new concept comes along to redefine the near future of the financial system—but not just that. Open X promises a new era for the industry, and its premises involve collaboration, integration and innovation.

 

It’s hard to have an accurate sense of how extensive the changes are occurring in the financial ecosystem. While they’re very important structural transformations, the need for a transition from a traditional, closed and focused model to another one that is decentralized and much more dynamic and attentive to the user’s requirements is increasingly evident.

It is in this sense that, as we will see, Open X represents maturity and evolution of this market and brings a series of benefits, both for users and for the different players in the payments and banking.

There is no escape: institutions will inevitably have to keep up with this transformation if they want to stay competitive in the game. Learn more in this article!

 

What is Open X?

Open X is considered a new era for the financial industry, the destination for the industry to reach and grow towards after Open Banking and Open Finance. This new phase meets the need to find new means of collaboration and integration for a structured exchange in data and services from different agents in the financial ecosystem.

Therefore, one can understand Open X as an open platform approach that allows players of different sizes and sectors to collaborate to provide financial products specialized. In less abstract terms, we can say that the model will resemble a marketplace integrated and shared, which will have the data of its users as assets (they are increasingly aware of the value of their personal information and able to decide with whom they want to share it).

Thus, there will be more structured and effective collaboration, facilitated by API standardization and shared insights from customer information. So the focus will move from financial products to user experience—and that’s why the term ‘Open X’ refers to an ‘open experience’. 

 

Open Banking, Open Finance and Open X: Understand their differences

As you may have noticed, we’re dealing with conceptions that have been addressed over the past few years when it comes to Open Banking or Open Finance. Indeed, Open X is all about that; after all, Open X is all about that; after all, it results from a maturing, growing movement that has been ongoing since we started developing the ‘open banking’ concept.

As we know, Open Banking is a model introducing an open banking system and user information sharing among different institutions, upon their consent. It is designed to enable customers to move their accounts through different platforms and migrate from one bank to another in a more streamlined and accessible manner, by considering their financial history so that different services are easily adopted.

Whereas Open Finance—which is under deployment in Brazil—entails an open financial system, which means other players joining the industry and, consequently, a more extensively open financial system as a whole. Apart from banks, other organizations can also share data and services, such as insurance brokers, retailers, manufacturers, retirement funds, etc.

On the other hand, Open X is even more extensive: we’re no longer talking about banks or merely financial institutions, but actually ‘everything’—which is what X stands for as user experience when it comes to the use of financial services and other related services.

Therefore, it results from previous evolving approaches, from a phase where data and services of a numbers of types, such as phone, retail and more, can be shared and integrated.

To illustrate, this combo includes complementary systems such as, for example, Open Insurance — an open system in the insurance market — and Open API — application programming interfaces available to external developers.

 

What are the benefits in Open X for the industry and its users?

By increasingly combining technological innovations with a continuous information exchange, data/service integration and focus on customer experience, Open X brings a number of benefits for all—for parties in the system as well as users.

Once data, resources and knowledge are shared, innovation leads to better products and services and, consequently, plenty of conveniences and a wider range of options for clients. At the same time, businesses become more agile and start seeing new possibilities in the horizon.

 

Open X: Benefits for consumers:

  • Stronger focus on customer experience;
  • More custom and user-centered solutions, new services more focused on their needs;
  • Management for different products in one platform;
  • More security and privacy, for being among the main concerns in this new era;
  • Facilitated access and more widespread financial inclusion.

Open X: Benefits for institutions:

  • Possibility to distribute products and services across different channels, with different partners;
  • New business opportunities;
  • Improved performance;
  • New partnerships for accelerating innovations and other purposes.

 

How can you prepare for Open X?

Since Open X is an evolution of what we are currently experiencing, it is inevitable to move towards it, as the transition to this new phase is already happening. So the best your organization can do is prepare yourself. In what way? Well, we talk about that a little bit later!

Planning

Since Open X is an advance from what we’re experiencing nowadays, it is inevitable that we also see it grow—the transition to this new phase is already ongoing. That’s why the best thing your company can do at the moment is to prepare. How can you do that? We’ll talk more about that in the following sections.

Reviewing strategies

Considering all those transformations, you might need to adapt your business model to be even more successful in the new scenario. That’s why it is key for you to review strategies and reassess your position in the industry. For instance, focusing on a certain niche can make your business stand out in the Open X context.

Further prioritizing users

As is already clear, the user experience it needs to be valued more and more and its focus, therefore, must be to make it increasingly digital and, at the same time, humanized. Access to a greater number of data allows for analysis and creating more assertive solutions, so the challenge here is to create a way to use this to your advantage.

It is also important to keep consumers informed on how their data is used and why—as well as on the levels of security involved in this process. That’s why focusing on tools for informing users as soon as possible can be a key differentiator for the future.

Bringing the right partners together

Open X has a premise of collaboration, which in turn entails partnerships. That means that institutions need to find partners to help them enhance their offers. A movement that should take place, for instance, involves traditional banks associated with fintechs to complement their services and accelerate innovation.

Investment in innovation

Last but not least, to enter the Open X era and be truly competitive, organizations need to embrace digital transformation by investing in emerging technologies of different types. Innovation will be responsible for enabling both entry into this ecosystem and survival in it, since it will be necessary to have robust security structures and data protection, for example.

 

Is your company prepared for the new Open X era?

What have you been doing to prepare for this new era of collaboration, integration and data sharing? The transition is ongoing and, in our rapidly-changing world, there’s no time to waste.

By keeping an eye on industry advances, Dock has worked on decoding the financial universe and enabled new and different players to join this system using out technology. Want to learn more? Learn about our global payment and banking platform.

 

Takeaways from this article

  • Open X is a new era for the financial industry, where we’ll have an open platform enabling players of different sizes and industries to collaborate so that they can offer specialized financial products;
  • In practical terms, the model works as an integrated, shared marketplace that has its user data as assets;
  • Open X results from maturing Open Banking and Open Finance and is considered a natural advance from this movement, which is in transition;
  • The new model brings various benefits for parties in the system as well as users;
  • In order to prepare for the new era, you need to plan, review strategies and business models, increasingly focus on the user, find the right partners and invest in technology.

 

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