FiDA Strategies & Opportunities for Financial Services

With the emerging FiDA regulation, Open Finance within the EU is progressing towards a new stage of development, moving away from conceptual discussion towards a strategic design challenge for financial services providers. The evolving European regulatory framework is not only transforming access to financial data, but is fundamentally reshaping roles, value creation, and competitive dynamics within the financial market in the long term.

Open Finance as a Structural Turning Point for Financial Services

Rising customer expectations, increasing competitive pressure from digital providers, and growing mobility of financial data are fundamentally altering competitive dynamics within the financial market. Through FiDA, the European Union is creating an additional regulatory dimension that not only addresses this development but structurally accelerates it.

However, this development is not an isolated European phenomenon. Globally, numerous markets find themselves at different stages of transformation from Open Banking to Open Finance. Whilst some countries have established broad access to payment data for years, an increasing number of jurisdictions are gradually extending their regulatory frameworks to encompass additional financial products such as loans, investments, or insurance. Other markets, meanwhile, have already embedded Open Finance as an integral component of their financial market architecture and utilise data-driven services as a central differentiating factor in competition.

For financial services providers, this means that competitive advantage will no longer derive exclusively from product design, but additionally from the capability to integrate, analyse, and translate data across institutional and product boundaries into relevant customer experiences.

A look at international Open Finance pioneers demonstrates that successful ecosystems emerge through different regulatory and strategic pathways. What they share above all is the consistent utilisation of the resulting data spaces.

In the United Kingdom, Open Banking has, for instance, produced a broad ecosystem of banks, FinTechs, and third-party providers. The transition to Open Finance is taking place there progressively. Early standardisation of interfaces and governance structures enables market participants to transfer data-based services step by step into the mass market. Through this approach, the ecosystem has already created economic value of more than four billion pounds. Furthermore, this evolution drives long-term innovation and thereby establishes a foundation for a cross-sector data economy.

In Brazil, the Open Finance ecosystem was driven much more by regulation. Mandatory participation of key players and a clearly structured roll-out led to rapid scaling of data-driven services. The consequence was a measurable shift in market shares in favour of digital providers who systematically integrated Open Finance into existing customer experiences. Thus, three of the five largest banks lost approximately 14 per cent of their market share within eight years following the introduction of the regulation. Concurrently, digital market participants such as Nubank are flourishing and gaining ever-larger market shares. This development demonstrates in an impressive manner how quickly established institutions can come under pressure when data access and customer interface become decoupled.

With FiDA, Europe is creating for the first time an independent regulatory framework for Open Finance. The objective is not rapid market opening at any cost, but rather the establishment of a stable, standardised, and consumer-centric data ecosystem.

Against this backdrop, FiDA is not to be understood as regulatory innovation within a national or regional context, but as Europe's response to global structural change. The transition from Open Banking to Open Finance does not mark an incremental step, but rather a new stage of development. For the first time, cross-institutional access to financial data across virtually all product categories is being anchored in regulation. This shifts the focus from individual products towards holistic management of financial information.

In our view, this positions Europe not as a latecomer, but rather as the architect of a sustainable Open Finance ecosystem that combines data-driven innovation with regulatory stability.