Open banking has evolved from a regulatory initiative into a global transformation of financial services. As nearly 100 countries move towards data-sharing frameworks and artificial intelligence accelerates the shift to open finance, Manaf Gardner Associates believes banks face a new strategic challenge: embracing innovation while protecting customer relationships, profitability and trust.
Open banking has spent much of the past decade being defined by application programming interfaces (APIs), faster payments and customer data sharing. Today, however, the conversation has shifted. Around the world, financial institutions are moving beyond open banking to open finance, where customer-permissioned data can be shared across a much broader range of financial products, from investments and pensions to insurance and lending. Combined with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), this next phase has the potential to fundamentally change banking business models.
According to JP Morgan Wired Reports (December 2025), up to 95 countries have now adopted some form of open banking framework, although implementation varies significantly between markets. The United Kingdom remains one of the most mature ecosystems, Brazil has emerged as one of the world’s fastest adopters by transaction volume, Australia continues to expand its Consumer Data Right framework, while the United States has taken a more fragmented approach due to its regulatory structure.
Data is becoming banking’s competitive advantage
For incumbent banks, the question is no longer whether open banking will happen. It is how they remain competitive in an ecosystem where customers increasingly control their financial data and AI being able to analyse it faster than ever before.
“If you were to ask traditional bankers what’s the main asset of your organisation, most CEOs would say it’s our people. That’s not actually entirely true, because it’s your data,” Professor Dr Colyn Gardner, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Manaf Gardner Associates said in an exclusive interview with The Digital Banker.
A former practising banker, banking consultant and academic, Gardner founded DC Gardner Group, which became one of the world’s largest banking training consultancies, before serving as the founding Chief Executive Officer of the Asian Banking School from 2015 to 2024. During his tenure, the institution trained nearly 200,000 banking professionals across ASEAN and became one of the region’s leading banking education providers. Today, through Manaf Gardner Associates, he advises financial institutions and senior executives on banking transformation, leadership and AI.
Gardner argues that the biggest structural change behind open banking is not payments technology but ownership of customer data. Traditionally, he notes that banks have treated customer information as a proprietary asset. Open banking challenges that model by giving customers the ability to authorise banks to share their financial data with third-party providers. “The banks would claim it’s their data and it’s their asset. But you and I are the people who actually own our data. So there’s an inherent conflict in this entire concept,” he says.
That reluctance has shaped the pace of adoption worldwide. In the UK, regulators ultimately required the country’s largest banks to participate through legislation after years of resistance and delays caused partly by legacy technology infrastructure. The objective was not to weaken banks, Gardner said, but to encourage greater competition and improve consumer outcomes.
The UK’s experience also illustrates the cost of transformation. Gardner noted that major incumbent banks invested billions of pounds modernising systems to comply with open banking requirements, while challenger banks entered the market without the burden of decades-old infrastructure. He noted that challenger and specialist banks now account for 60% of gross SME bank lending in the UK, a portion once held by traditional banks, according to statistics released by the British Business Bank. “The challenger banks do not have the legacy IT systems and infrastructure costs of the traditional banks. They’re cherry-picking the best parts of the business.”
Customer experience has become another differentiator. Opening an account with a traditional UK bank can take weeks, while challenger banks can complete onboarding within an hour, and in some cases, within minutes, Gardner notes. Rather than viewing this as a failure of regulation, he sees it as evidence that incumbent banks underestimated how quickly new entrants could compete once access to customer data became standardised.
Open finance: how AI is reshaping the transition
As open banking transitions into open finance, savings, investments, pensions, insurance policies, mortgages and wealth management portfolios all become part of a connected financial ecosystem. Gardner believes artificial intelligence will dramatically accelerate this transition and says collaboration between regulators and financial institutions will be essential to avoid unnecessary disruption while maintaining momentum towards open finance.
“Bank CEOs are faced with challenges over and above introducing open banking. They have geopolitical risk, AI transformation, supply chain disruption and increasing pressure from customers who may need greater credit,” he says.
AI is already reshaping core banking operations. Gardner points to the use of AI-driven credit analysis by some challenger banks to accelerate loan decisions, contrasting this with processes at traditional institutions that can take considerably longer.
For incumbent banks, the implications extend to workforce transformation as well. “It won’t be rosy for people who do not adjust. People will either have to make sure that they upskill themselves or re-educate themselves.”
After watching banking evolve for more than 50 years, Gardner remains optimistic about the industry’s long-term trajectory. However he believes success will depend less on adopting open banking and more on adapting organisational culture, business models and talent for an increasingly data-driven future. “Banking has changed enormously over the past 50 years. This is globally one of the most exciting periods to spend a career in financial services. The future is rosy, but only for institutions and people who are prepared to change.”
