The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has laid out an ambitious roadmap to bring open finance to life by 2030, promising to make borrowing faster, smarter, and more personalised than ever before.
Building directly on the success of open banking, which now serves nearly 17 million active users, or about one in three UK adults, open finance will extend secure, consent-based data sharing far beyond current accounts and payments.
It will pull in credit, savings, investments, insurance, pensions and more, powered by emerging technologies like AI.
This should lead to tools that could deliver instant loan decisions for small businesses and AI-driven mortgage dashboards that forecast exactly how overpayments could shave years off your home loan, all while analysing your full financial picture in real time.
Real-world examples already in testing
The FCA’s report includes detailed case studies that show exactly what this future could look like.
Take Folu and Ade, who run a family coffee shop. They’ve struggled to get business loans because traditional applications couldn’t properly assess their cash flow.
With open finance, a fintech app pulls together real-time transaction data, credit information and wider finances, pre-populates the loan form, and lets a retail bank approve the loan the same day.
Or consider Sara, a first-time homeowner. Instead of juggling separate apps, she uses an open finance-powered mortgage dashboard from her digital bank. It combines her mortgage, current account, savings and current interest-rate data to model scenarios: overpay now and clear the loan two, five or ten years earlier.
The system automatically adjusts monthly overpayments, flags when spending spikes and lets her pause with one click, all without manual spreadsheets.
Similar dashboards are envisioned for investments and debt management.
TechSprints run by the FCA between November 2025 and February 2026 already tested prototypes using synthetic data.
Participating firms developed AI-enhanced affordability assessment tools for mortgages, reusable data packages for loan applications, and AI-assisted business planning for SMEs, showing the technology is moving from concept to prototype fast.
A clear timetable for rollout
The FCA’s open finance roadmap sets out a pragmatic, phased plan:
- 2026 (Collaboration to prioritise): TechSprints and a PolicySprint focused on mortgages, a new taskforce (PRISM) to rank use cases by consumer impact, competition and growth, and a Q4 discussion paper on the first formal scheme.
- 2027 (Design and coordination): Work with the Treasury on the long-term regulatory framework, testing shared infrastructure and governance.
- 2028–2030 (Scaling up): Launch sustainable industry schemes with strong consumer protections, interoperability and ongoing review as new technologies emerge.
The regulator is aiming to be deliberately agile, learning from open banking’s voluntary variable recurring payments scheme and the UK Payments Initiative, while exploring where new rules are actually needed for authentication, consent and interoperability.
McKinsey has estimated open finance could add 1–1.5% to UK GDP by 2030. Combined with open banking, the annual economic impact could reach £7.4 billion within five years.
The FCA is now actively seeking industry, consumer-group and fintech input. It has launched a taskforce, opened an email inbox ([email protected]) for feedback, and is running further sprints and infrastructure research.
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