Wych In The News - Fintech & Open Banking

Wych's Head Of Sales, Ben Ford, recently joined Scott Schuberg, CEO Australia at Cognito Media for Episode 1 of Cognito's brand new podcast 'That's What You Think.'

In a wide-ranging discussion they discussed all-things Fintech and Open Banking in Australia & New Zealand, and how we compare globally.

Thanks to Scott for putting together such a professional show and set-up.

Full show-notes and transcript are here ⬇️

That's What You Think Podcast

Episode 1: Ben Ford on FinTech & Open Banking

Host: Scott - CEO, Cognito Media Australia

Guest: Ben Ford (aka "Mr. FinTech" / "Super Fit Dad")  - Country Manager, Wych

Keywords: FinTech, open banking, financial services, sustainability, screen scraping, data sharing, consumer data right, financial literacy, mental health, fitness, financial inclusion, personal financial management, agentic AI, venture funds, financial innovation

Introduction

Scott: Hi and welcome to That's What You Think. This is a podcast where I'll welcome guests who are heavily opinionated, like guest number one here, to offer opinions chiefly in the technology, financial services and sustainability space. My first guest is called a few different things. Firstly, he's called Ben Ford, sometimes Mr. FinTech, sometimes known as the fittest dad in Sydney - while his shirt's off, but his shirt's on today. So big warm welcome to Ben Ford. Thanks very much for joining me.

Ben: Scott, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Some of those names are accurate, a couple of them aren't, but we'll save that for later. And you get me in the shirt today, so we'll see how long that lasts.

Ben's Career Journey in FinTech

Scott: Listen Ben, whether it's FinTech events in Sydney like the Finnies last night, Bangkok, Amsterdam, China - you're kind of there from my perspective, you’re all over the Fintech scene. We're going to talk about open banking today chiefly, but more broadly, you are somebody who has a lot of touch points within the FinTech industry in Australia and globally. You can give us judgments about where we're at here versus other regions. Give me a sense of how your career evolved into what it is today and exactly what it encompasses.

Ben: I guess I'd sort of describe myself, probably harshly, as a bit of a FinTech dilettante. Basically, I've been around for such a long time now that I'm like a cockroach - I'm sort of unkillable in the FinTech ecosystem. I've been around a long time, I've seen a lot of changes, a lot of companies come and go. I've been able to work with them as a vendor, sell into a huge number of them - probably close to 150 now, I'd say. That's given me a good view and lens on the overall industry.

With various jobs I've had along the way, it's afforded me some good opportunities to travel. Lately, I've been able to parlay or merge my other passion, which you mentioned - fitness - with FinTech together. This seems like quite a fun, frivolous thing, but actually I'm increasingly seeing, particularly amongst startup founders and FinTech founders, wanting to do right by their team and provide opportunities for the team to stay fit and healthy.

There's also the link between mental health and physical fitness, and how that can keep founders going. It's a pretty tough job founding a FinTech company or any startup, and if you don't look after yourself, there can be some pretty bad knock-on effects.

The Evolution from Screen Scraping to Open Banking

Scott: I met you about eight years ago now. I was running a financial services firm, and you were working for a company called Yodlee, a big US tech play. At the time, we were doing some personal financial management stuff, looking at how to scrape data for customers and aggregate that into API things we were building. The only real tools we had to aggregate that data seemed to be scraping data from third-party sites, which involved handing over credentials - usernames, passwords - to big banks. At the time, it seemed fairly reasonable because there wasn't much around in place of that in Australia. Looking back, it seems kind of bizarre. I'd love you to give me a sense of where we've come from that time and how the open banking landscape in Australia has evolved.

Ben: I think it's worth going even a step further back to understand why anyone would be doing that - why would anyone be sharing their financial information, and what benefits could it bring? The idea that you would pony up your online banking credentials to a third party to enable some kind of data sharing seems very murky.

How I chanced upon this, before my time at Yodlee, was working for Dun and Bradstreet, the credit bureau. We'd have clients who were lending - companies like Cash Converters, payday lenders, or lending to customers who perhaps couldn't get funding from the banks. It came up in conversation when we were selling credit checks - they were saying they were getting bank information using this method. We said, "Who in their right mind would actually do that?"

The answer was: people who really need the money, and they need it quite quickly. They're prepared to share that information because it's a trade-off. "I need the loan for whatever short-term means, today or tomorrow. The way to do that is to provide my credentials so I can get a quick and easy lending decision."

That's the backdrop. Then we had companies come along like Afterpay, companies like Zip - absolute success stories using this methodology. These were the early FinTech companies in Australia, probably the first wave of FinTech companies using this approach.

Then there were organizations like yourselves and other companies where the idea would be that by sharing your online credentials or linking your bank account, you can see all of your financial information on a single app or dashboard. Instead of having to go into my superannuation website to see my balance there, instead of having to go to my bank to see my savings, I can see it all on a single dashboard. It's quite a powerful concept.

This concept of a super app spawned businesses like Revolut internationally, and we've had real success stories with companies like Pocketbook here in Australia - the first Smash Hit PFM (personal financial management) tool. They got to 400,000 customers or users, which for a consumer app in Australia - I generally say anything over 100,000 is very good going. If you get to plus 250,000, you're doing really well and potentially have a pretty good business there.

The Benefits and Challenges of Data Sharing

Ben: The sharing of your data, however you do it, can provide real benefits to a consumer - whether it's getting funds you need immediately, or being able to manage your finances better and create more wealth for your family as you go through life.

That's why screen scraping - the idea of sharing your online credentials with a third party - took off. Then there's been this theme or trend across a number of different countries over the last seven or eight years to make it easier for consumers to more legitimately port that data over or share their data with whoever they want, so they can get better financial products. The idea is not to let the big banks, particularly here in Australia, have this lock and key hold over your finances.

If you want to go to a smaller, more agile, cool provider that's got some really disruptive products, don't let the bank say "No, we're not going to share the information with that other party because we view it as a competitive threat."

That's led to this global open banking theme and trend. In some countries, it's been brought about by legislation. In Australia, we have something called the Consumer Data Right. In Europe, it's been very prescriptive. Here in Australia, in other jurisdictions, it's been less prescriptive, and actually industries have sort of come together and done it for the greater good.

Australia's Open Banking Progress vs Global Standards

Scott: Are we on the right track? We talk about this evolution, Australia has taken a particular approach in trying to operationalize this and legislate it, but I still don't see it. I loved Pocketbook, I thought it was great, but I don't think they were able to monetize it sufficiently. I think it got bought by Zip and then disbanded. I know there's a couple of startups doing PFM apps, which is great, but still in 2025, I don't have an app on my phone that aggregates all my stuff and tells me everything. I still feel as though the big bank accounts I've got aren't doing anything to welcome any other open banking data to come into their platforms. Have we done something wrong? Adopted the wrong model?

Ben: We're probably living in the wrong country, Scott, if I'm honest. There was an interesting stat that I think 10 million consumers in the UK have engaged with open banking in some capacity. The UK has got a 65 million people population, maybe 40 million of those credit active, so one in four - 25% of the population who could interact with open banking have done so. In Australia, I reckon we're probably at maybe 5%, if that.

I think we've got a fundamental problem in Australia - the big four banks and other banks have a lot of power. They've been dragging their heels on open banking. What's pretty interesting is they despised screen scraping when it was around because there were concerns that it invalidated the ePayments code, it was dangerous to share your credentials, security breaches were a risk. But there's never been a screen scraping data breach - not one, not to my knowledge, and definitely not here in Australia.

The big banks viewed screen scraping as a very nefarious way of people getting hold of data and as an existential threat. They blocked screen scraping from one of the biggest apps in Australia - that was Raiz, formerly Acorns, which is a roundup app. When Raiz came out in 2016, you could link your bank account or bank card to the app, and every time you tap that card to buy a coffee, it would round it up to the nearest dollar, put 50 cents in an investment fund.

That was great - Millennials had no way of starting to get on the investing bandwagon, start to build a portfolio of managed funds, ETFs, low-cost funds. So suddenly you've democratized wealth management and investing so people can get in and learn about it when they're 18, 19, 20, and start to make savings.

A bank blocked screen scraping, and there was a bit of an outcry. The users of that app - there were probably about 300,000 in number back then - were told to complain to CBA, which they did in their droves, because suddenly they were no longer able to do their roundup transactions. They did so in such numbers that CBA instantly put the screen scraping back on.

The point is, at the time, screen scraping was the enemy. It now feels like the banks hated screen scraping, wanted to block it, then something else came along which they actually viewed as potentially an even bigger threat - open banking. Now it's pulling data and making data freely available for people to share, but it's legitimized. So that's an even bigger threat potentially.

They actually dislike open banking more than they disliked screen scraping before, which is kind of a weird reverse. I don't think the banking sector in Australia is missing a trick, because actually open banking is a massive opportunity for them to win market share from their competitors, but they view it as a chance for them to lose market share to other fintechs.

The Banking Perspective and Incentives

Scott: Let me play devil's advocate. I'm a big bank, I've built my business, I get bashed over the head by APRA from time to time, go through royal commissions. I've got this customer base, and you talk about it being an opportunity, but if I'm a market leader or part of the big four, I've got very sticky relationships with my customers. They have savings accounts, term deposits, home loans, perhaps broking accounts with me. Everything feels like a threat when you're in that position. What are the opportunities for them? Why would they do it? Can they monetize it? Can they set up toll ways and charge for this data, or do they have to open it up and give it away?

Ben: It's probably a 10-year project. The legislation came in 2018, so we're probably still a few years away from some kind of maturity. You mentioned the stickiness of customers to the banks - the question is, are they sticky because they're sticky in a good way, because they're loyal and deriving loads of benefit from being a customer of yours? Or are they sticky because they can't go anywhere else, or can't be bothered to go anywhere else?

If it's the latter, then we're going to start talking about a Lazy Tax. I think there was a study done by Queensland University of Technology that found that Australians as a population are missing out on about $12 billion or leaving $12 billion on the table annually in terms of not shopping around for better interest rates, being overcharged for products they can't get out of.

If people did have the freedoms to do that, you could argue that it's inertia - people can't be bothered to do stuff and are just happy to sit on a mediocre product. That's probably true to some degree, but if it's so hard to actually switch to a different product or provider, then that's not really operating for the good of society.

A bank might say, "Well, we're here to make profit for our shareholders and stakeholders," and that's completely fine, but don't then also pretend to be looking out for your customers if you're not necessarily doing that.

Personal Experience with the Lazy Tax

Ben: I've had a go at this myself. I changed my Super Fund recently, and I'm reasonably financially savvy. Finding out the fees that my new super fund was going to charge me required going through a 30-page PDF product disclosure statement. The combined fees were across three different pages - one was on page 8, one was on page 16, and the other one was on page 21. I had to fossick around like Hercule Poirot to try and find out what the total fees of my Super Fund were to make a comparison.

The average punter is not going to have the knowledge to do that, the inclination - they probably will give up. That's emblematic of the problem. If it is made easy, the open banking sell should not be "open banking is good because you can do this." It should be "open banking could save your household $10,000 a year. Would you do it?" Everyone would do it.

It requires a bit of work, but it's pretty easy because the plumbing and infrastructure is there, and your providers are going to make it super simple to understand what you're doing and how to execute on that. That becomes a much more compelling proposition than "open banking can help you switch a bank account," because that's not particularly sexy.

Accelerators and Business Models

Scott: What is it that's going to come along and move it along more quickly? We want not just technology and regulation and rails, because they seem to be there now, but we need some sort of accelerant to mobilize this money. Are they other banks? Are they disruptive FinTech companies that have an alternate model to monetize a service like this? What's the business model that comes along and says, "I'm an innovator, I'm an entrepreneur, I've found a way that I can get scale and profitability by helping port money from one bank account to another using these rails"?

Ben: The case study there, the jewel in the crown in the Australian FinTech ecosystem at the moment, is a company called WeMoney. You link all of your accounts using open banking, so you've got the safety and guardrails of a regulated way of getting the data in. They effectively scrutinize your accounts and see if they can serve you with better offers elsewhere.

What they did differently to say a Pocketbook and some of the other personal financial management apps - they monetized it from the get-go. You have to go through a full ID verification check and a credit check when you download the app, which is quite a friction-full experience when you're signing up to a new app. A little bit more pain there on the way in, but then all of a sudden, I got a notification from them saying "you could get a better interest rate on your mortgage."

At the time, I hadn't linked my HSBC account because you can't really link HSBC accounts using screen scraping. You can now with open banking, of course, but I thought it was quite intrusive. Then I thought about it - I ended up going back to HSBC and getting a quarter point taken off my own mortgage. I didn't need to shift, but it saved me a significant amount of money over the course of 12 months.

They would then get a clip or kickback from the loan provider if you do end up switching to them. That's their monetization model. If your offer is compelling enough, I don't really think it matters what the business model is, Scott. You've got to be able to clearly articulate what savings you're going to deliver.

UK vs Australia: Key Differences

Scott: You talked about the UK model - one in four of their active population having touched open banking. Where does Australia rank and how does it compare? What are the kinds of things happening overseas that we could be doing a better job of?

Ben: There are two main differences between open banking in the UK and open banking in Australia. First is that payments, or the movement of money - payment initiation, as they call it - has been part of the regime there since the get-go. It's not included here at the moment.

It's all very well to be able to use open banking to share data, but what if you can cause it to move money on your behalf as well? Seeing the data is one thing, but you can't necessarily move funds at that point, which is what's happening in the UK. 50% of the open banking transactions in the UK are now payment-related.

The second difference is that screen scraping was phased out or banned in the UK. Once the banks were operating under the "big nine" - the nine largest banks in the UK - once they were up and running with functioning and solidly performing open banking data, screen scraping was then phased out.

In Australia, we've got the two still running side by side. How is open banking ever going to succeed if you've got a direct competitor running alongside it? It's just nonsensical. Until that happens, I genuinely don't see how open banking is ever going to take off, because there's something there that people have already built in, they use it, it works.

The accelerant has to be: don't give people an option to not use open banking.

Consumer Advice and Industry Messaging

Scott: What's your advice to consumers? How can they help push this along if the government is either not equipped to or is hamstrung by some of its biggest stakeholders?

Ben: That's tricky. Consumers don't know what they don't know. If they've not been presented with an option, and they're not nerds in FinTech like you and I, then no one's ever heard of open banking. You speak to anyone about open banking at a barbecue, literally their eyes close over and they walk away from you.

The messaging probably needs to be done - and I don't know who would run this. There's this hypothesis that you don't want people to be aware of open banking, but you want to make them aware of the benefits that it can give them. I don't think the onus is necessarily on consumers to do that.

If they consent to a screen scraping flow when they're applying for a loan, they don't know that it's ineffective. No one's going to go, "By the way, this is supremely risky" as they're filling out a form to get the loan. The proposition has been put to them: "You go through this process, you'll get your loan in three hours instead of three weeks, because we don't need you to send in three months' worth of manual bank statements."

Banking Efficiency Benefits

Ben: Going back to the banks not having a huge incentive because they're losing margin and market share - what open banking will enable them to do, and what screen scraping enabled them to do, was move away from that paper-based system. Their credit assessors could take a five-hour process and distill it into 30 minutes.

The saving there for the bank is bigger the bigger the bank is, because they can process more loans. They're a big bank, so they get more loan applications going through, they can process them more efficiently. So actually, they get a proportional benefit. They've got more savings to gain, or efficiencies to extract by leaning into something like that.

There are still a number of banks out there, probably some of the smaller ones, that are still very manual in their approach to credit assessment. The incentive for them to adopt something like open banking is you move away from this very manual, transactional paper-based system and digitize and streamline your entire operation, making you a more efficient business.

Consumer Behavior and Subscription Models

Scott: Consumers need to become aware of what the opportunity cost of this Lazy Tax is in order to then say, "These guys have built an app, they want to charge me $19 a month for it." Do they need to do some deeper dives on how much that could potentially save them?

Ben: The subscription model is one that's been hard for people to really succeed with or make stick, because there's the idea of paying for anything and some money going out, as opposed to it being slowly siphoned off.

My view is that maybe some of these businesses need to be super sharp and laser-focused on selling those benefits. They've got to say, "Scott, it's going to cost you $20 a month. We're not just going to save you $50, we're going to save you $150," so that the $20 just seems insignificant and inconsequential.

It's the same when you're selling into a business - you can say, "You're spending half a million dollars at the moment, we'll give it to you for $200,000," and they'll say, "But you've forgotten that it's going to cost me $700,000 to change the thing over," and that's where you're not actually saving them any money at all.

I still think no one's yet come at me with that compelling message: "I've just been through a little financial profile, I'm on my way to saving $10,000 a year across four different financial products, doesn't require that much effort, just needs to sync up your bank accounts."

UP Bank and Neo-Banking

Scott: The other FinTech we probably haven't mentioned is UP Bank. They're a neo-bank, digital-only bank, actually owned by Adelaide and Bendigo Bank now, so they're fully backed by a large bank. But their user interface and the experience of dealing with them as a bank is so cool and fun and never breaks down, with really interesting product features. If you go to a pub, you're behind a younger person at the bar, they whip out this orange UP Bank card. Happens all the time. They're becoming ubiquitous. I think they've got a million customers now.

Ben: Yeah, UP Bank has done well. What worries me is all the big banks have their venture businesses. It feels like if anyone comes up with a good idea, perhaps there's an incentive to buy it off the market before it becomes a problem for them. UP Bank was designed with the consumer first, picked up by a larger bank, but surely anything they deliver as a product that has a sharper pricing model than their parent creates two conflicting businesses competing for the same dollar.

The Health of Australia's FinTech Environment

Scott: How healthy is the FinTech environment in Australia at the moment, and what does it need to thrive? These innovators need to be able to monetize their models without thinking about being bought up by one of the venture arms of the big banks.

Ben: It feels like it's a bit cyclical. We're in this roller coaster at the moment - it's been frothy, then there's been a bit of a blip, and funding has dried up over the last couple of years. It sort of feels like there's a stabilizing phase at the moment.

What that meant a couple of years ago was pretty much a lot of fintechs that had been funded when there was a lot of money sloshing around, but probably weren't brilliant companies. They were probably good ideas, but the likelihood of them ever taking the next step to become a scale-up or medium-sized business - there were just a lot of them that were not very good.

It's almost like a resetting to the mean, and I don't think that's a terrible thing. It's been quite sad sometimes, but it's been a kind of natural attrition that probably had to happen.

There's a degree of soberness now, but there are some really good FinTech businesses that are just trundling along and staying in their own lane. They're never on LinkedIn, they're never out at awards, they're never at events, because they're being run by operators as a small business that they want to grow into a medium business, and ultimately into a large business.

I don't really know what the answer is to innovation, because we do have some powerful operators who outperform a bunch above their weight on the global scale. I don't know how many of the big four are in the top 10 most profitable banks in the world, but probably two at least, maybe more, which is astounding if you think about it.

European FinTech and Agentic AI

Ben: I was just in Europe at the Money 2020 conference in Amsterdam - probably 8 to 10,000 delegates. The open banking part of the conference was pretty well attended, about 80% full. Open banking isn't mature, but they kind of know what it is over there, and it's operating across all of Europe.

In the same arena was the agentic AI summit the following day. The agentic AI thing was packed to the rafters, not a spare seat, standing room only, crowd about seven or eight deep watching the talk. The adoption of agentic AI in financial services across Europe - it's not a new thing, it's almost well established.

There was one panel where they were talking about adoption by some of the investment banks in Europe. UBS has 60,000 co-pilots or agents in their wealth management business. These are sweeping changes - you can now take a team of 100 people and have 10 agents with two humans doing the same work and output as those previously 100 people.

That's mind-blowing, in a way terrifying, but you combine that with free-flowing data and cool innovation, and you get to this point where things are pretty sexy. I came away from that - hopefully it's not all hype and not a bubble that's going to burst. I don't think it is, because it's moved through the hype cycle in Europe.

Here, I think people are still a bit more reticent about it. They don't quite know what to do about their AI strategy or agentic AI strategy. But I think things are going to change probably in the next two or three years pretty rapidly.

Personal Story: Super Fit Dad

Scott: We're going to wind up with something a little lighter. You think you pointed out that I got your handle completely wrong before, but I've remembered it. It's Super Fit Dad. Mental health, your health and wellbeing - you've talked about how that seamlessly fits in with some of your FinTech exploits. Talk me through your story a little bit.

Ben: Super Fit Dad started life as a blog that I started writing shortly after my son was born - Super Fit Kid, naturally. I've always been pretty fit, pretty active. Prior to moving to Australia, I was doing a few marathons and things like that, played football a lot. I struggled to find time to work out or go to the gym, felt guilty about it after Drake was born.

So I started blogging about my experiences and doing home workouts that I then share. Very small readership, just sort of quite a cathartic experience. I've always liked writing. Built up a bit of a mailing list, and I send out workouts every weekend for new dads to do.

Occasionally I'd get someone come back to me and say the only workout they did that week was my workout. They printed it off in the nursery, taped it to the wall, and they'd do the workout silently while trying to get the baby to sleep. I thought, if I get one email like that, then it's worth it, because I'm helping myself and potentially helping a few other people as well.

I've done some personal training work for FinTech organizations - I've worked with Frollo, Stockspot (which is a robo-advice investment business), Tank Stream Labs (one of the co-working spaces). I've done some work with FinTech Australia themselves, and more recently with Money 2020.

I took fitness boot camps and yoga classes, which was a bit of a new one for me, and we delivered a fitness program that ran alongside the FinTech conference in Bangkok. The yoga classes in the wellness area would get 20-25 people. The boot camp - doing boot camp in Bangkok heat, even at 7am, is about 36 degrees. That's not fun, but still, a few people came along. I was the one who was sweating the most, so naturally got the shirt off.

It's just a nice way to combine the two passions - the FinTech and the fitness. You and I have spoken about a situation I had with a family situation a year or two ago where we lost my sister-in-law. It's been a journey and an interesting experience since then. There's been some highs and lows for me personally in the wake of that, and some very low points.

The fitness and being able to do workouts through summer on the beach at Coogee and then go for a swim every morning has just been a game changer for me in terms of keeping my head straight.

Scott: Of course, mate. Thank you very much for sharing and thanks for being part of our inaugural podcast here. Ben Ford, thank you.

Ben: Thanks for having me, pleasure.

End of Episode 1