Open banking: does sharing your data make you switch?
46 recent papers study digital banking and open banking, mostly in finance journals and mostly through adoption surveys. Open banking was meant to let customers carry their data to a better offer. Did it make them switch banks, and who gained the better loan terms?
What prompted this#
Since October 2025, 46 papers carry a digital-banking, open-banking or data-portability keyword, up from 36 in the year before and 26 two years earlier: "digital banking" on 32, "open banking" on 10. Twenty-six appeared in finance journals, the rest in economics, marketing, information systems and management journals. Over three years they sit next to financial inclusion (16), fintech (16), bank competition (8), fintech adoption (8) and financial stability (8); many measure adoption through surveys rather than what customers did. The UK required its largest banks to open their data in 2018, the EU did so under its payment services directive, and the US finalized a personal financial data rights rule in 2024. A related note asks whether fintech made banking more competitive; this one looks at the data-sharing channel.
Questions#
- Did current-account switching rise after open banking, and which banks lost customers and deposits?
- Does shared transaction data lower loan rates for borrowers with thin credit files, or mainly help lenders price more finely?
- Who opts in to sharing data, and does that select the customers lenders want anyway?
Data that could help#
UK open banking statistics (API calls and active users), UK current account switching figures by bank, and bank-level deposit and lending data.
Next step#
Run an event study around the UK roll-out, comparing switching and deposit growth at the nine banks that had to open their data with challenger banks.