Paris – As part of our open banking series of interviews in partnership with Finastra, we spoke to Sophie Guibaud, vice president at Fidor Bank, to find out how she thinks open banking will affect the financial services community in the months to come.

According to Guibaud, open banking will ensure the formalisation of the roles that financial services organisations have been playing over the past years.

“Aggregation is not new at all, but there are two types of actors that will be truly formalised; the aggregators and payment initiators… It will also be more beneficial for the consumers because we put them in control of their data. We also give them more choice and we can expect more transparency in the fees they pay. Fintechs, meanwhile, will have access to the data and have the ability to create new services. And banks will have access to data and realise new opportunities to monetise premium APIs.”

When asked about the main challenges she thinks Fidor Bank will experience whilst trying to remain competitive in a new world of open banking, Guibaud talked about the importance of seeing open banking as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

“Fidor has been leveraging open banking for many years…so we would see it as not really a challenge, but actually an opportunity because now everything will be based on APIs and it’s going to be much easier to integrate new partners and new fintechs directly onto our platform,” she said.

Guibaud went on to discuss the benefits that Fidor Bank expects from the open banking industry transformation including integrating fintech partners onto their platform.

“So Fidor, since its inception, has been running a fee based on APIs. It has enabled us to basically bring over new opportunities on one side within the bank by integrating fintech partners directly onto our platform to create a one-stop-shop experience for our partners. Thanks to PSD2 we have been able to accelerate that and to integrate more and more fintech companies so at the moment we have 50 on our platform and we expect of course to add on more,” she concluded.