Economic secretary Bim Afolami has announced a new industry-led Open Finance Taskforce.

The new taskforce will be chaired by the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), which was launched last year in a bid to unblock barriers to growth in the UK FinTech industry.

The Centre said that the move will build on the foundational work done by its industry-wide coalition on Open Finance by providing recommendations to the government on how financial data can be "safely unlocked" to improve SME access to credit.

The new taskforce was one of the recommendations outlined in the CFIT's Blueprint Report, which was published in February.

It will have a mandate to identify and prioritise more use cases for Open Finance, data sets to be unlocked, and APIs to be created in order to facilitate better SME finance availability.

At FStech's RegTech Live in February, Andy Millar, head of strategy & external engagement, global Open Banking at HSBC said that most aspects of Open Finance can't yet be done in full because not enough data is available. For example, banks can't share data with insurance companies.

“The reason cards are so successful is because if there’s card fraud, customers know they are protected,” he said. “Open Banking doesn’t have that same level of liability support and that’s what needs to happen to get it to the next stage.”

The new taskforce will also identify commercially viable approaches to incentivise businesses to securely share their financial data.

“Britain has long led the way when it comes to innovation in financial services, and Open Finance is the next great opportunity for our economy," said Ezechi Britton MBE, chief executive of the CFIT.

Other recommendations in the Blueprint Report include taking forward Proofs of Concepts (PoCs) built by its industry-wide coalition with Citizens Advice and HSBC to "show the real-world impact of Open Finance on vulnerable consumers and on increasing SME lending volumes".

CFIT has been engaged in discussions with various partners about how these PoCs can be scaled and said it also expects to make an announcement on this in the near future.

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