Open Banking Made Simple: New Outbound Features for Rapid Deployment and Minimal Effort

In the fall of 2023, the Department of Finance in Canada announced a plan to adopt consumer-driven banking, with an Open Banking framework going live in 2025. While this presents opportunities to enhance customer experience and improve digital capabilities for Canadian financial institutions, it also brings forth a set of challenges, particularly in navigating the Open Banking requirements.

Through extensive discussions with leaders in Canadian financial institutions and our hands-on experience assisting key clients in the launch of their Open Banking APIs, we identified the main challenge: limited budget and resources. This challenge is particularly acute for small to medium-sized financial institutions striving to develop and maintain new and existing infrastructures, like complying with Open Banking requirements.

Introducing Hosted Consent Management and Analytics Dashboard - core out-of-the-box features of Outbound - to launch a comprehensive Open Banking program with minimal development cost & resources.

Hosted Consent Management

Data consent and visibility have emerged as pivotal aspects in consumer-driven banking to meet the increasing market demands and are fundamental to establishing customer trust. This means that data consent and providing customers with the ability to manage their consent will be pivotal in implementing Open Banking. Navigating the technical, legal and risk requirements for consent, however, is no easy feat.

Flinks’ Hosted Consent Management is an out-of-the-box portal that seamlessly integrates into your institution’s banking platform. This portal empowers your customers to view, manage and revoke consent, along with a comprehensive overview of their historical activity.

Elevate data security for your customers

• Minimal resource requirement: The consent portal is hosted and monitored by Flinks, and will evolve with regulatory requirements to ensure compliance. This allows your financial institution to channel resources towards other significant initiatives.
• Bank-centric experience: Designed with your institution in mind, the consent portal is fully customizable and white-labeled to ensure your institution is at the center of the experience at all times.
• Speed to market: Navigate the launch process with ease while positioning your institution at the forefront of data security and customer-centricity.

Analytics Dashboard

Currently, over 9 million Canadians are actively sharing their data through screen scraping, and yet financial institutions have zero visibility into the specifics of where and how this data is being shared and leveraged.

With the Analytics Dashboard, your financial institution will gain access to a portal of key insights, shedding light on the who, when and what accounts your customers are connecting and sharing their data with. The best part? These powerful insights are readily available for you to harness out-of-the-box with Outbound.

Instantly uncover insights into user behaviour

• Holistic and granular insights: Go as granular as individual third-party application partners, and derive actionable opportunities, such as strategic product partnerships and innovative offerings.
• Monitor connection performance: Track partner connection outcomes to swiftly identify and optimize performance for seamless operations.
• Mitigate security concerns: Stay ahead of security risks for your customers with the ability to revoke consent to applications, and further bolster your institution’s commitment to data security and trust (coming soon).

The road ahead with Outbound

With the introduction of Outbound in 2022, Flinks’ overarching vision is to foster a consumer-driven financial industry that benefits both Canadians and financial institutions. From establishing partnerships with cutting-edge technology companies to actively participating in legislative discussions in Canada, our team is committed to delivering a top-tier Open Banking solution tailored for financial institutions.

To learn more about the full potential of Outbound, such as our recent partnership with Xero to automate reconciliations and how we helped esteemed financial institutions like EQ Bank and FirstOntario Credit Union, talk to one of our Open Banking experts today.