 My goodness, after that introduction, I might as well, I'm going to go and say bye. Leave everyone on a good note. I see a couple of you are still eating. I love it. I love it. Keep eating. It's all right. I'll ask you a question when you've got something in your mouth. So, as Priscilla was saying today, I'm going to talk to you about open banking. Originally my talk was intended to talk specifically on the challenges that we face as designers in open banking. Who here knows what open banking is? Awesome, because that is why I wasn't going to talk about the challenges of open banking, and instead I was going to tell you about what open banking actually is. But before we start, when it comes to banking, sometimes I really do feel like we still live in a world that looks a little bit like this. And don't get me wrong. I signed up on my first bank account about 17, 18 years ago now with HSBC. God bless them. And, you know, you've got this little passbook. I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember. You've got this tiny little passbook. And when my piggy bank was full, I would go to the bank and I would drop all my coins on the counter and they would count them up and they would write a credit. And then when I had saved enough money back then, a very long time, I would go back into the bank. I'd ask for my money. I, you know, no doubt I had a personal relationship with the banker. She's like, darling, what do you want to buy with this money? I'm like, I want to buy a Nintendo game. Now give me the money. And she used to just, you know, write a little debit. And that was pretty much what banking was about. It was just a sum of your credits and your debits. Now the interesting thing is that it feels as if time hasn't really changed. You know, in the intervening 20 years, we've had telephone banking, internet banking, mobile banking, but really it still is just a series of credits and debits. And now we've just got a passbook, but it's, you know, it's, it's this big, right? There's nothing really intelligent that we've seen in our banking services. But I do have some good news. I'm not all doom and gloom, I promise. There's currently going, most of you will know now, we're going through this huge financial technology innovation period where people truly are trying to revolutionize and disrupt the fintech industry or the financial industry. And thus comes the rise of what we call open banking. And open banking specifically is talking about something called open APIs. I won't go into the technicalities of it, but for those that aren't technically minded, essentially it's just a way for a third party to be able to communicate to your bank. And after all the permissioning and authorizations, be able to extract specific data back. So the particular third party will not hold your information themselves. They will just seek the information from the third party as needed. But let's have a look at what open banking is actually defined as. Fundamentally, open banking really just changes the, changes who has control over the financial data. So who here has banked over five, more than five years? More than five years, yep, more than 10 years, more than 15 years, now I'm starting to feel old. All right, fantastic. Now, for those that have banked for over 15 years, if you want to get a mortgage or if you want to get a car loan or if you should be so lucky to get married or want a large-scale vacation and need to apply for a loan, I can guarantee you the process of getting a loan will be harder than the holiday itself. And why is that? The data is mine. The information is about my spending. All of the things that I have done in my life is I spent, I paid the bank back, I provided you with information. Now, why can't you as a bank allow me to take that information and go to whoever I want to and ask them to provide me a better service than you do? Well, luckily for open banking, because we will soon be able to do just that. So, in our current model, our banks have held all the information themselves in this tiny little silos, right? So let's say I wanted to go to a third party, be it lending, be it anything really, they've typically had to go, well, could you print out three months' worth of statements and I need your SING pass and your passports and I need your employment contract. And before you know it, you've got a stack worth of papers and you're going, I thought we live in a digital age. Do we? I'm not too sure. Well, with open banking, it now kind of offers you that choice to securely share your financial information. With the businesses, of course, that you trust. So financial products and services really will be faster and more personalized. And I'll speak a little bit about what that means in a little while, but it does mean that you'll get loans that are more affordable, your savings and your budgeting apps are really built around you and your needs and mortgages will really be able to be completed just like that. Done. And how cool would that be? No more thousands of trees that we print. So let's look at how we can take advantage of some of these services. So first I'm going to talk a little bit about secure identity services. Now here in Singapore, we're very, very blessed. We have something called the SYNC Pass. Who here uses their SYNC Pass regularly? Yes? If you don't, it's amazing, do use it. SYNC, for those that don't know that are not Singaporean, SYNC Pass is a way for you a government identifier, essentially. So whenever you open up a bank account or so and you just provide your SYNC Pass details and it says that I am who I say I am. But in other countries, unfortunately, the UK, the US and New Zealand, Australia, we don't have those luxuries. So every single time you try and do something with a new third party, you have to provide your passport or a driver's license. But in open banking, what you are essentially saying is instead of... Actually, let's step back a bit. If you connect to other apps with... connect with Facebook, connect with LinkedIn, connect with Instagram, anyone? Good. Now imagine if you couldn't connect with your bank. Imagine if now you can download a new app that helps you to become more financially savvy and all you need to do is go through a similar process as connect with Facebook, but you connect with your bank instead. And this app suddenly knows you, has 20 years worth of data about your spending, can start using algorithms, machine learning, AI to truly decipher what that data means rather than just giving you a list of credits and debits. Which one would you prefer? And ironically, a lot of people kind of go, oh, but what about the security aspect of it? Because, you know, I'm giving my information to somebody else and information is power, right? Well, one of the key priorities in this whole open banking regulations is around financial security. So they are building APIs and forcing third-party service providers to also adhere to financial regulations. So we need... There's lots of technical things that I can go into, but essentially what I'm saying is you really don't need to worry about the security aspect of it because at any point, you know, another example that I use quite frequently is anyone here give third-party apps access to their Facebook. So you log into Facebook and then you start signing up for another app inside Facebook, yep. And you know how you've got a little modal dialogue that pops up and goes, do you want to give this person access to this data? Well, this is exactly the same way. This is just open APIs. It's exactly the same way that it would work with banking. So the third-party provider will say, please log in here. You then get shoved off into another screen. That screen will be your online banking. You enter in your credentials, which are secure. The third-party cannot see. And then the bank goes, hey, we've had a request from Merchant XYZ. Do you want to give access to them? What data do you want that person to have? And for how long? And that's important for how long? Because in open banking, at any point, if I no longer trust you or if I feel like you're no longer providing a service that I need, I just retract my access rights from you. And you don't have any copies of any of the data. So that's cool, right? Right? No? Okay, well, let me give you some more examples. Who here has more than one bank? Who here banks with more than one bank? Brilliant. How's that working for you, logging into five, six, seven different online banking accounts? Pain in the arse, right? Absolutely. Well, guess what? Open banking will solve that for you. And you know why? Again, because you have one single app, the app will then ask you, the one-off, logging into all of your different bank accounts and then will aggregate all the data for you. Now, what is the one thing that you don't have if you bank with multiple banks? No idea? You can't budget, right? Who here has multiple accounts and then has a spreadsheet where they budget? Right? So, exactly, yeah. A few people are like, hmm, budget you. About that. But look, essentially what we're trying to say is we now have a very smart tool to be able to aggregate your data, the perspective of which banks you bank with and how many thousands you have, and then use the technology out there to start crunching numbers. The other thing that I've noticed recently that an app in the UK has recently come on and done this is technology like just computer smarts. There's nothing really that savvy, but it told me that I had paid twice for a monthly subscription. Now, I wouldn't have noticed because day in and day out, I don't really check my transactions, but it was smart enough to send me an alert and go, hey, are you sure you want to pay for this twice? And all I needed to do is just ring my bank and go, please, I don't want to authorize the second payment. I would have been out of $75 had I not noticed. But secondly, the interesting thing that has now allowed me to do is to be able to kind of say, I have this goal, be it a wedding, be it a house or whatever, help me get to that goal. So the app is now able to say holistically, irrespective of what bank account or what card I use, it can give me suggestions like, hey, did you notice that you've actually spent $200 on groceries today or on restaurants this month? Have a think about maybe cooking at home or simple things like spending a lot of money on your phone bill or people like you typically put this amount of money aside as savings. So you start to get a much richer view of the financial information that you hold. The second bit on financial forecasting and personalization is the personalization part. So again, who here uses comparison sites? Comparison sites, good. Do you find them useful? Do you find them that you are able to understand what the hell it is that they're offering you? Yes? Good. Is it personalized to you and your situation? You have to personalize yourself. Bingo. Okay. What if you connect with your bank and then it'll tell you all of the products that you're eligible for and those that you aren't. And it'll tell you, based on your current spending, how much it will cost you to do a repayment on a particular loan or on a particular credit rating. But more importantly, the personalization part is what if the next step of that is you can just apply from it, from right there. You don't have to go to your bank or to your mortgage lender or to your, you know, anything. You literally just press a button there and that's done. And that's the next bit that I'll talk to you about in a second. But the personalization aspect that I love the most is the ability for me to start comparing like for like. So when I look at credit cards, right, there is cashback. There is reward points. There's air point miles. What else am I forgetting? There's free holidays, room upgrades. Okay. And how do I compare HSBC card to a Barclays card to a City card to a OCBC and all the other banks? How do I compare them? Because I can't compare like for like. Because at the end of the day it's just marketing, right? They're just telling me what they think I want. But instead, with an open banking, they're forced to give you a synopsis of what the product holdings actually are. So you're comparing like for like. And you're able to say as a customer, these are the things that are important to me and you see the list of credit cards reducing or loan applications or whatever, reducing down to that one single product that you as an individual want. Again, the power is yours rather than having to do all that crazy homework. I now talked a little bit about application being instant and I want to talk about cheap, easy, instant money movement. Who here uses PayPal? Right. Is it useful? Okay. Imagine being able to do that everywhere and not having to use PayPal. Imagine being able to move your money as easy as sending a text message. Right. That is what we're going to be able to do. And we already see lots and lots of providers out there being that intermediary or not even intermediary that we've kind of slashed away the intermediary because you remember currently on PayPal you go from your bank to your credit card provider, your credit card provider through PayPal, PayPal to the merchant, right? So I've got three people in here before the merchant actually gets paid. Every single one of those people gets a cut and guess who's going to pay for that cut? You are in your prices, right? So with open banking you go straight from your bank to your merchants. No intermediaries, no excess prices, cheaper prices for us. So let's have a look at a real life example. Let's say Beth and Jason are looking to either get a new house or maybe see whether or not they can expand their current house, right? So these are the typical steps that you would go through. Am I missing anything? I do a search on what houses there are, right? I do some online research about whether or not it's better to upgrade or it's better to expand my current footprint. I need to compare rates. Who here even understands rates, right? Floating rates, variable rates, whatever rate. Budgets, I love these spreadsheets. I saw a few people with budgets, yeah. Don't forget the calculators because they always work, they're always personalized. Then you have the advice from friends and families and that is probably one of the fundamental part that I think we don't do enough of. And then you've got to consult your contractors, right? And after all of that, if you've done that and if you haven't quite lost your will to live, which most of us have by this stage, you might have a decision about whether or not you want to expand or whether or not you just want to buy a bigger house. Or what typically happens, somebody just falls in love with a house in their research and just goes, oh, screw it, let's just do that. Whether or not it's a good financial decision. And then after all that, you then go to the bank and you try your hardest to get alone. Now, what if that would change? What if you have... And I'm not... This is genuinely... Right now, there are three apps that put together will do all of this. They would help you with the budgeting. They would help you with the property search based on the things that you can afford. They will help you find... Calculators and try and understand what it is that your repayments will be. They will do all of the research for you, all in one centralized place, personalized for your situation, so that you can then make a decision about whether or not you can live with $200 a week less or you can live with a mortgage of $500,000. Right? So it's very, very big choices that we need to make that we're currently not making with any amount of education. It's just a stab in the dark. And having that kind of ability to be able to centralize all of that, to have it all mean something to us, I think in terms of financial astuteness, it's really gonna get us places. So there really isn't really any dispute in saying that using smart technology will help us improve our lives and will help us improve making better, smarter financial decisions. But as a designer, this really kind of opens up a whole new world for me because I'm now excited about what all these APIs can do and allow me to do. The experiences that I can now design centered around me, centered around financial problems, rather than centered around the technical limitation that my bank has. You know, you have artificial intelligence, you've got peer-to-peer lending, you've got big data, you've got blockchain, crowdfunding, all of these things are all coming out of this open API. So, not surprisingly, I wanted to talk a little bit about open banking in Singapore because obviously this has been a very generalized approach of what open banking is. And the reason why I wanted to talk about open banking in Singapore is so the monetary authorization of Singapore or MAS is I'll refer to, they have not given out any compulsory regulations and what that means is basically they've said, here's some guidelines to banks, you can do it, we encourage you to do it, but it's not law, which is fine, right? And you will see that some banks have kind of taken up the challenge and have opened up what they call API platforms. So it's basically just a central data platform where you're able to kind of call the different APIs. Now, here's the difficulty that we have with not regulating APIs. We now get to, sorry, before I get to that, the International Data Corporation, which is international as it says, was very, very wonderful enough to give us a super high readiness rating saying that Singapore is creme de la creme, you know, like we are so ready for open banking. Now, if you look underneath all of this, the problem with that statistic is that all they were basing the data on is are there banks out there that have created open banking platforms. Great. HSBC have OCBC. Visa MasterCard have got their own one. CTF said DBS has got one. Basically every man in this dog has one, but guess what? For you as designers and any developers here, it's actually super damn hard for us to integrate with any of these. And the reason is there is no regulation behind it. So you will find that they won't provide a consistent APIs across all of them. So in terms of the language and the structure of our APIs are very different. The data that you get is very different. The comparison that I talked about before around product to product, you know where I compare like for like, that's not possible because there's no regulation that tells you infield X have this data. Infield Y have this data. So you still haven't been able to unlock that true potential of open banking. But wait, apparently there's all these different banks that are currently doing it. Which on the flip side means that at some point there will be some international disruptors that will turn around and create such an amazing experience for us individuals or even for us designers that suddenly the banks out there will realize if we don't change the world will move from underneath us. So I'm hoping that even though, you know, has anyone here heard about Monzo? No? Okay. The first digital bank in the UK, they basically started with just offering a card that had money on it. Name escapes me. But they eventually got their credit, their license to be a bank. And within six months went from a startup to having one million customers. One million customers in six months. And you know what? I've got plenty of friends back home that are still signing up for Monzo. Why? Because they're using APIs, they're using smart technology to try and help me do better budgeting. And I can see a lot of Scandinavian, Swedish banks are also starting to do really amazing stuff. This is just the start of it. For me, I really think that banking is on the brink of just a revolution. I think it's next companies that will be like Uber, like Facebook, like Google, that will be built on top of these APIs, right? So we won't be a bank. There won't be financial institutions as we know it. But it will really open up this phenomenon and allow us to create functionalities that we've never even dreamed about. But the one thing that I want to challenge you with as designers is what are you going to do in 2019? If all of this amazing data is out there, why not take the time to think about what your problems are as a financially astute individual and see whether or not there's APIs out there where you can build a platform that will help other people around you to solve that? Who here is going to look into it? I've got a couple of hands. Awesome. I'll sign up as your first customer. Promise, right? Any questions? So either people have fallen asleep. Thank you. So I've worked with open APIs enough to understand that while there are rules governing how you should use them, often people can use them in different ways. And maybe this is going too deep down into it, but what guarantees are there in the open banking API world that your data once transmitted will actually not be retained? So that comes back to that financial regulation that I was telling you about. So even though this is a startup, even though this is the likes of the latest app that you've downloaded, if they deal with financial APIs, they need to get financial regulation certificates. So they have to adhere to similar controls as the bank does, but they do not have to have the monetary backing because obviously they're not the ones holding the money themselves. All right, so Irina, we also have questions behind. So these are from the audience. I think the top question is very, very interesting. So who owns the data? Who's the GDPR person? Awesome. I like you. Come stand up. Awesome. All right. So for those that don't know what GDPR is, this is a very astute individual over there. Okay. So GDPR is around protection of your personal data. It came out of the EU. Open banking actually also came out of the EU. There is something called Payment Directives Regulation 2. They're on to their second version. They're about to go on to their third next year, which essentially keeps that data protection in mind. In terms of who owns the data, currently the banks. With open banking, they will no longer own that. You will own that. Well, they will still hold it as the database, but you have full access and rights to provide visibility to anybody else of that data. It could be anything. It could be the customer segment that you belong with, the full transaction history, and any applications that you've made with the bank. It's all up to you to determine what data you want to give this particular third party. So again, remember the example that I used with Facebook and the app, where you have a little pop-up and it says, this particular organization wants to access this data. This is the data that they want. Either they call it by the API names. Let's hope not. Or they might just say they want transactional data. They want history. They want application. They want product holdings, card holdings. And then you say, I give them this right? Yes. For this period of time? Yes. Okay. Off it goes. So you are the one that's in control of it, but the bank still retains it. What are the... Things are changing in front of me. Right. Are there any institutes that will facilitate open banking? If so, wouldn't there be a certain commercial bias to steer users towards certain providers? Yes, that's happening right now. The reason why this is happening right now is banks are specifically in Asia, not so much in the UK, because they're heavily regulated, both from the EU regulation and the local regulation. But in Singapore, what they're doing is banks are opening relationships, partnerships with these third parties. So banks typically have a much larger voice, because they've got a larger customer holding at the moment. So your DBS will say XYZ product backed by DBS. And because you know DBS as a brand, you're typically more likely to say, yes, I'll go with that particular provider. But again, this is about the fact that you hold the information, so you can determine whether or not you want to give them access rights. If they have the experience that you need, then fine, I'll go to whichever provider. Just give me a good, bloody experience. Solve my problems, rather than just give me a series of credits and debits. What about open banking versus digital wallet? Okay, so digital wallet uses exactly the same functionality as open banking. So your Alipay, your WeChat, is that third, you know, the third box that I had on the far right? It's all about moving money easily. So again, Alipay and WeChat and Google Pay and Apple Pay kind of got ahead of the curve. The way they did that is through partnerships with Bank, which is why now there are certain bank accounts that you can't transact with on Apple or Google Pay, wallet, whatever you might call them. But in the future, because it'll be open banking, all banks will be able to go through those channels. They've gotten ahead of us, but it doesn't mean that there aren't providers out there in the future that will be able to facilitate that and cut that third party out. Will it be dangerous if central banks hold our sensitive data and provide an open bank API to share to the vendor? Okay, I would love to know who that person is because I don't quite understand the... Okay, so it's not a central bank that holds it, right? It's not... I think this is around the example that I gave. It's not a central bank. If you have five different banks, those banks will still store that data. It's just a way for you to collate all of that information into a centralized app or a centralized experience. I hope that I've answered that question. If I haven't, whoever asked that, please stand up. What are the challenges going to be with open banking? Good question. Several challenges. So there is an organization... I talked a little bit about APIs and the way that you structure it. There is an organization coming out of the U.S., not surprisingly, but they're not for profit organization, and they're trying to create a global API standard so that every single bank will structure the API for know your customer exactly the same way so that from a technology perspective, it'll be easier for us. From a developer and designer perspective, currently it's really hard for us to know what data is out there. If you have a look at the DBS API platform, they have a fancy-ass marketing name that I can't remember, apologies. But their database has got 278 APIs at last check. Now, that's 278 pieces of data that you can request. But how do I know what those pieces of data do? So there is a certain aspect of designers in this area to truly start to have to understand how finance fits together on all the different elements. So that'll be the hardest bit, I think. Could you help us understand what's the business motivation for banks to give APIs? Oh, I missed that last part, so I'll just answer the first part. What's the business motivation? Currently, there is none here in Singapore other than the fact that the rest of the world is getting ahead of them. So again, it started as the EU regulation, and regulations are law, so therefore banks had to do it. The reason we did that was because of the financial crisis, the regulators and European regulators in particular realised how much power banks had, and therefore when Lehman and Delights collapsed with them, they took quite a lot of information and data. All right, I think that's enough questions for you to answer on the spot. Thank you so much, Irina, for enlightening us on open banking.