Part two of our Open Finance insight looks at open banking, what it means for workplace pensions, and which providers have launched open-banking-enabled products since the launch of the open banking initiative in 2016.

Most providers also allow the user to re-categorise transactions after they have been automatically categorised. However, Scottish Widows do not.
If a transaction from a specific merchant is re-categorised with any workplace pension provider’s open banking portal, automatically or manually, this will update and re-categorise all previous transactions from that merchant and all new ones going forward.

All users of all five workplace pension provider open banking portals are also able to search by category only over a specific date range. This will then show an aggregated total spend for that category over the required date range. This can be done for multiple categories.

When it comes to better personalised financial outcomes, all five workplace pension provider open banking propositions say they will use data from open banking to help drive better outcomes for the end user.

This includes intelligent messages or nudges regarding spending (all providers), intelligent messages or nudges regarding saving (all providers other than Intelliflo), and intelligent messages or nudges regarding debt management (all providers other than Intelliflo and True Potential).

These messages are sent as a push notification via an app (all providers other than Intelliflo), a push notification via the portal (Mercer Master Trust, Standard Life, and True Potential) and as a secure message to a message centre within the portal (Mercer Master Trust, Standard Life, and True Potential).Messages from Intelliflo and Mercer Master Trust are also sent via secure email.

With the purpose of open banking being putting consumers in control of their financial data to secure better outcomes, consent has been a key aspect of open banking legislation.

Open banking rules require the user to renew their consent every 90 days. Our data shows that all workplace pension provider open banking propositions will automatically notify the user to do this. Standard Life and Scottish Widows do this via push notification. Intelliflo, Mercer Master Trust and True Potential send their notifications via email.

If the user does not renew their consent before the 90 days is up, all providers will also send a second reminder at this point. If the consent is still not renewed at the end of the 90th day, for users of the Intelliflo, Standard Life and True Potential propositions will find their account with be discounted and all history deleted.

Overall, our data shows that encouraging progress has been made by some workplace pension providers when it comes to open banking, with more providers offering propositions (and widening existing ones) than when we last visited the subject last year.

However, not all propositions are equal. This is very quickly evolving space and we expect to see propositions develop and grow as demand increases. Aegon, Fidelity and Legal & General have told us that they would like to have an Open Finance solution in place by the end of this year.