The Rise of Financial Services Ecosystems: Towards Open Banking Platforms

The recent developments in regulation, ICT technologies and purchase and consumption habits of customers are profoundly changing the competitive scenario of the financial services market. In particular in the European context, PSD2, although limited to the payment services segment, is promoting a greater level of competition and efficiency within the market, reducing barriers to entry for new payment service providers (called TPPs, which also include FinTech firms). To this purpose, PSD2 explicitly empowers account holders with the authority to share payment data, removing the financial institution’s role as gatekeeper and starting the Open Banking phenomenon. When banks actively comply with PSD2, new credit and financial ecosystems and Open Banking platforms can arise, in which participants share information through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and develop, produce and distribute innovative and value-added financial products and services for the customer. This chapter aims to theoretically examine to what extent information sharing, although limited by regulation, reduces banks' ability to generate value through the management of information asymmetry issues and their ability to build long-term relationships. We argue that banks’ ability to generate value can be negatively affected to the extent that banks decide to preserve their status quo, thus the way in which banks decide to comply with PSD2 is the crucial factor to consider.