Apple acquires UK open banking startup Credit Kudos
Unfortunately it seems that the biggest application of open banking (beyond "see all of your accounts in one app") are these type of credit risk analysis products with opaque (to the individual) algorithms responsible for informing decisions that have a potentially massive impact on a person's life. To apply for credit (such as a mortgage) you're required to connect your bank account to these services via Open Banking, allow them to extract all of your transaction data and trust that they make reasonable, unbiased and fair recommendations based on that data.While I understand that high value lenders (e.g. mortgage providers) made similar assessments based on submitted paper bank statements, the massive proliferation of these services using Open Banking (or worse, screen scraping after requesting your account credentials) is concerning. Especially in cases where they use difficult to reason about AI/ML algorithms. The volume of data that can be gathered far exceeds the n-months bank statements typically requested by a mortgage lender, and it seems that most lenders use third parties like Credit Kudos rather than doing the same risk analysis in-house. Generally speaking, I don't trust them and their networks of partners and contractors to keep my data secure.And it looks like it's becoming increasingly difficult to avoid these services when applying for a mortgage.