The UK is losing its leadership in open banking, having “laid the rail track, but hesitated to run the trains”, the author of a landmark UK fintech report has warned.
On the fifth anniversary of a UK fintech sector review, described as “seminal” by fintech industry body Innovate Finance, its author warned against complacency.
Speaking at a London event marking the anniversary, Ron Kalifa, former CEO of fintech giant Worldpay, who carried out the Treasury-commissioned review, said part of the goal was to help make “the UK the best place in the world to start, to scale and to list a fintech business”.
“Today, I think we can say with great confidence that we have made great progress,” he said. “Fintech has become one of the UK’s most important economic engines. It’s no longer an idea on a whiteboard, it’s no longer a promise of future growth – it is delivering here and now.”
To put facts behind his claim, he referenced the statistic that fintechs, or alternative lenders, now account for 60% of lending to UK small and medium-sized businesses. “That means when a small business in Manchester buys new machinery, or a startup in Birmingham hires their first employee, there is a better than ever chance that the capital is coming from a fintech platform,” said Kalifa.
Creeping competition
He said the UK is the “global leader outside the US”, but warned that countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which this year briefly claimed second spot in fintech investment, and India, which is close to reaching that position, are threats to the UK’s ambitions.
The UK regained second spot in 2025, after attracting $3.6bn in investment, according to Innovate Finance figures. “We are not coasting on legacy, we are competing. Leadership is not a trophy you put on a shelf, it’s a position you defend every day,” Kalifa warned. “Let’s just face the hard truth. We risk becoming the country that invented open banking and then watched others commercialise it.”
He cited the UK’s failure to move ahead in open banking as a story to heed.
It was 2017 when the Competition and Markets Authority’s Retail Banking Market Investigation Order meant UK banks were required to implement open banking regulations, which led to the development of application programming interfaces (APIs), to give consumers more control over their bank accounts.
The end goal was to increase competition in a retail banking sector dominated by big financial services companies. Customer banking data is shared by the industry through APIs, with customers’ permission, enabling businesses to offer tailored products.
Open finance, as open banking’s next phase is often described, will see firms use APIs to share banking data across more services, such as mortgages and loans, and offer products and services from external organisations.
But Kalifa said the roadmap for open finance, “once the next chapter” of open banking, is “still waiting to land”, and pointed to countries such as Brazil and India, which are moving ahead.
Speaking to Computer Weekly last month, Chris Skinner, fintech industry expert and CEO at The Finanser, described open finance as “a bit of a miss and hit affair”.
“Some of the things that we have seen through the open banking forums have proven that this can work,” he said. “But there are also still teething troubles between different providers, particularly when a part of the system goes down.”
Kalifa also warned that digital ID, the foundational infrastructure for a modern financial ecosystem, remains too narrow and too slow in its application. “It is, in many ways, as if we have laid the rail track and hesitated to run the trains on it.”
He said in the global tech race, “hesitation is expensive”.
