Fund groups including Fidelity International are working with fintechs to make fund comparison more easy and potentially leading to quicker transfers.

The ‘open finance’ initiative for funds is led by The Investing and Saving Alliance (Tisa) and centres on the UK’s savings and pensions market.

Greater competition is expected to result as customers become better informed.

The Open Savings, Investments and Pensions plan - which also involves Hargreaves Lansdown and Coutts & Co - involves the use of application programming interface (API) standards, which will be developed in partnership with Moneyhub, a UK-based data and payments platform.

The first stage of testing will run from October 2021 to the first quarter of 2022 using synthetic data, after which live customer data will be used until the project goes live in mid-2022.

The open finance concept has been widely promoted within Europe’s retail banking market, whereby individual’s account details can be accessed by third parties, with the account-holder’s permission.

The idea is that fintechs and other service providers can offer financial services via APIs without needing the permission of banks.

“Just as you can compare car insurance quite easily online today, we hope that one day soon you'll be able to quickly and in a transparent manner review your savings, investment and pensions, so you can quickly switch from one organisation to another if you’re not getting the best available deal,” said David Dalton-Brown, CEO at Tisa.

“For that to happen, the industry needs to collaborate on developing standards for open finance that are as robust and respected as those for open banking.”

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