Open banking – 90-day reauthorisation relaxed

Open Banking in the UK is overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which recently announced changes that will make lives much easier for small business owners!

The background

Open Banking was designed with the goal of making it easier for licensed companies to access customer bank data more easily, with their permission. It is Open Banking that was behind an update to the format of most of the bank feeds used by software such as Xero and Quickbooks.

As the format of these feeds changed, business owners were left with a requirement to reauthorise the link to the bank every 90 days, and it is this requirement that is changing.

There’s good news at last!

The primary benefit of bank feeds is that it should be a one off ‘set-up and forget’ for businesses to really benefit, and we’ve lost count of the number of conversations we’ve had with clients who find the 90-day refresh to be frustrating.

The FCA has been speaking to the payments industry and from March 2022 some changes are on the way. The most important one from a client perspective is that you should be able to reconfirm once within your software that you’re happy for them to continue to access your bank data, and for all of your accounts at one time.

In theory there should then be no more 90-day refreshing!

In reality, it may well take more than the three months between now and March 2022 for this to materialise. Banks are notoriously slow to get their systems up to date, and obviously the software companies also need to get this in place. It’s definitely on it’s way though, which has to be a good thing!

If you’re not using bank feeds yet, they can make a HUGE difference, even allowing for the current 90-day re-authorisation. Why not get in touch and let us talk you through the process and start seeing the benefits for yourself?