LFP141 – Open-Banking: Super-Important for SMEs w/Matt Cockayne CCO Yapily

Open-banking hype has generally focused on the consumer marketplace. However SMEs can potentially benefit more especially as they currently pay for banking services. Accounts and transactions can be consolidated improving cashflow management and payments can be made at a far lower cost and far faster as well as cool stuff like including “pay me” buttons in invoices to speed up receivables.
In this episode Matt Cockayne of Yapily takes us through the SME open banking marketplace and we cover a schematic of how it all works.
How do you connect to open banking? How does authroisation work? Is it just a set of pipes connecting accounts or is there added value taking place.
We get the whiteboard out and sketch the whole process.
Topics discussed include:
Matt playing rugby at the junior Wasps and Junior England levels
Playing with Johnny Wilkinson
Breaking knees and necks (eek!)
Recovering from injuries overly fast and dangers therein
Matt’s career journey
The multiple pros and cons of small indie companies and large established companies
Structure over the journey from SmallCo to BigCo
the chasm in-between – few MedCos and why
open banking pres has been focused on retail open banking whereas SMEs are a more robust use case
main use cases for SMEs: consolidating transactions and various accounts and getting better overall cashflow visibility
paying and being paid at lower cost and more promptly

less reluctance to share business data than private data
changes with screen-scraping having been outlawed
how this has changed attitudes
schematic of how open banking works in terms of data flows, setting up etc
Yapily don’t just connect information between accounts but standardise (banks use different formats) and enrich the data
can embed a payment button in invoices so as to get paid that much easier
FCA need to regulate any company using the open banking process -so many SMEs will access via software packages
need to refresh consent every 90 days – industry pushing to make this done by the accountancy system firms not by client
can get much much cheaper and faster payments for SMEs 
SMEs generally pay for banking services hence are more motivated than consumners who don’t pay
Open Banking – payments and Open Finance – putting more financial products into APIs
the industry is moving towards Open Finance, a superset of Open Banking
Yapily’s offerings
no legacy of screen-scraping or selling of data (prevalent in the industry)
growing fast
And much much more
Share and enjoy!