Artem Lyashanov: How Intelligent Money Management Is Displacing Traditional Payments

Artem Lyashanov is a transactional business expert and manager with many years of experience in the banking and non-banking financial sectors. His professional path is a combination of rigorous discipline, fundamental education, and practical experience in scaling international fintech projects.

A new powerful source that can radically change the rules of the game is Open Banking. This is the concept of open data, which allows customers to securely share their financial information with third parties in order to receive better and more personalized services.

Many scenarios for using Open Banking, such as identity verification, are already in high demand, while others are still years away from mass implementation. However, Open Banking is gaining momentum every year, and it is time to start thinking about it seriously.

What is Open Banking and how does it work?

Open Banking is a technological and regulatory model that allows third-party service providers to access a customer’s banking data.

Technically, this process is implemented through APIs (application programming interfaces) provided by banks. Fintech companies connect to these gateways to create value-added services. This allows them to use customer data to remove unnecessary barriers, simplify financial transactions, and deeply personalize services.

The fundamental idea of ​​Open Banking is to give users back control over their own data.

Artem Lyashanov

Key use cases:

• The ability to see all your accounts, cards, loans, and investments in one application with automated budgeting;
• Real-time income and creditworthiness checks allow financial institutions to approve loans faster and more reliably;
• Users can view, monitor, and cancel recurring payments directly in one interface;
• Companies gain a better understanding of their spending through cash flow dashboards and automated reporting;
• The user decides who to grant access to, and real-time verification significantly reduces the risk of fraud.

One of the most promising benefits of open banking is the Pay-by-Bank option during checkout. The customer connects their account to a wallet or online checkout through a third party, making A2A (account-to-account) payments as easy as paying with a card.

Why is it beneficial?

• Instantaneous;
• No interest;
• Savings;
• Reliability.

Open Banking and Pay-by-Bank create serious competition for traditional card systems. The latter are already forced to defend their market share under pressure from digital wallets, P2P applications, stablecoins and BNPL services.

Global Landscape

In the most advanced markets, only about 20% of consumers and small businesses are actively using the benefits of open data. This is both an important achievement and an indicator of the huge potential for growth, especially compared to traditional card payments. In regions where regulation is just emerging, this figure barely reaches 11%.

Several specific obstacles prevent the widespread spread of Open Banking.

The main barriers to growth:

• The volume of financial information transmitted by Open Banking is significantly larger than standard data when paying with a card. Today, less than half of users trust banks with access to their data through open interfaces;
• When banks use different standards, it is more difficult for developers to create universal products. Until a single system of interoperability is introduced, the speed of service development will remain low;
• The rules for operating Open Banking vary greatly depending on the region. In some parts of the world, legislation is already being updated, in others, important norms have been under discussion for years. This creates risks for businesses and forces companies to act more cautiously;
• Consumer protection. This is a critical issue for direct account-to-account (A2A) payments. Unlike cards, where there is a refund procedure, direct transfers often do not have such a mechanism.

We are now seeing the stage of standards formation. The main obstacle to Open Banking today is the issue of security and trust. Card systems have taught us that any problem with a transaction can be solved through the bank. Until open banking has the same clear mechanism for protecting consumer rights, it will not be able to become a full-fledged replacement for traditional cards for the mass user.

Artem Lyashanov

Challenge to dominance or a new source of profit?

On the one hand, cheap account-to-account (A2A) payments threaten the dominance of credit cards and put pressure on commission revenues. On the other, this is a huge field for innovation, where market leaders can create solutions based on open data that were previously technically impossible.

Strategic Opportunities:

• Pay-by-Bank Integration as a Advantage. As the technology becomes more popular, consumers will expect to see a pay by bank button at every online checkout;
• The underlying cost of A2A transactions is so low that fintech providers can offer merchants fees that are 40-85% lower than card acquiring, while maintaining higher own margins through value-added services;
• Open Banking allows transactions to be automatically routed to the cheapest available payment method. This creates additional value for businesses looking to optimize their operational costs;
• Software as a Service (SaaS) is increasingly integrating payments into their products.

Key Risks and Challenges:

• Pressure on traditional revenue models. A2A payment fees are often fixed or below 1%. This makes them extremely attractive for large checks;
• Cost of data access. There is an ongoing debate in the market about whether banks have the right to charge for providing access to their APIs? Some banking giants are already introducing tariffs for access to payment data. If this trend takes hold, fintech companies may face high costs for entering the Open Banking system.

Payment companies should stop perceiving Open Banking as a threat to transactional revenue. In fact, it is a tool for the transition to intelligent money management. The value is not in the transaction itself, but in the data that helps this transaction take place faster, cheaper and more securely.

Artem Lyashanov