Hosted at Deloitte’s New Street Square office in the heart of the City of London, the team was delighted to welcome Marion King, the newly appoint Chair and Trustee of the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) as the keynote speaker who built on the event’s theme.

Steve Allen, Industry Chair for the UK Finance Payments Product and Services Board, opened the evening by reflecting on the vast change agenda that faces the industry and the importance of moving forward together, making sure that the work is joined up, inclusive and cohesive.

Steve highlighted that the industry are working through a number of significant changes, including the NPA, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and Open Banking. Making sure this works well together for the industry will be key.

Marion King, the newly appointed Chair and Trustee of the OBIE spoke next, reflecting positively on her first 30 days in the role and the exciting opportunities ahead.  She spoke of the recent exciting news that the volume of active open banking user volumes had now reached seven million users and how this is testament to the growing popularity of the platform. 

Marion also reflected on her commitment as Trustee to make open banking payments a permanent and reliable alternative to cards and other payments but that this cannot be done in isolation and needs the support of the whole ecosystem – regulators, industry stakeholders, and the growing community of users. 

Marion spoke of the pivotal point open banking is currently at, while it awaits the recommendations of the Joint Regulatory Oversight committee (JROC) on its future direction. She talked about her excitement for the future and the potential for open banking payments to revolutionise the payments industry. She concluded by reiterating open banking’s commitment to working closely with stakeholders to deliver on its the priorities of ensuring value to customers and fostering competition and innovation in the financial services industry.

Finally, Tom MacDonald, Head of Transaction Banking Services at Deloitte introduced Deloitte’s latest research on the Future of Money, which identifies four dramatic change scenarios for what money will be and how the economy will value, store, transfer and exchange it in the future.  

We would like to give a special thanks to Deloitte for hosting the event. The insights from all the event’s speeches provided us with good food for thought, and reinforced our focus and priorities for the year. Our team at UK Finance looks forward to working with the collective payments industry to meet the challenges that lie ahead.