Ezechi "Ez" Britton has been appointed independent chair of the steering group charged with designing the United Kingdom's next generation open banking governance body — a move that signals the country's most consequential structural overhaul of financial data infrastructure since the original Competition and Markets Authority order nine years ago. With more than 11 million active monthly users now operating within the open banking ecosystem, the existing framework has demonstrably outgrown its founding mandate, and the appointment of a chair of Britton's calibre sends a clear signal that the transition to a permanent, fully independent regime is no longer a policy ambition — it is an active construction project.
The body Britton will help design, provisionally designated the Future Entity in regulatory communications, is set to absorb the core functions currently administered by Open Banking Limited (OBL) — encompassing standard-setting, performance monitoring, directory management, and certification. Critically, it will be constituted as a dedicated non-profit organisation operating under the supervisory authority of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). That structural choice — non-profit, FCA-overseen, industry-funded — reflects hard lessons learned from the limitations of the original CMA-mandated model, which was effective at launching the ecosystem but was never designed to sustain its long-term commercial and technical evolution.
From CMA Order to Statutory Permanence
The roots of the UK's open banking architecture trace directly to the CMA's 2017 retail banking market investigation order, which compelled the country's nine largest current account providers — collectively known as the CMA9 — to build standardised, secure application programming interfaces (APIs) granting authorised third-party providers access to customer data and payment initiation capabilities. To execute the directive, the Open Banking Implementation Entity was established, subsequently renamed Open Banking Limited. The regime succeeded in placing the UK at the forefront of global open banking adoption, but its legal perimeter was inherently narrow: the mandate applied exclusively to the major retail banks and was centred on basic payment and account-data functions.
Secondary legislation under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 now provides the statutory instrument for the transition. That legislation explicitly transfers long-term oversight of open banking to the FCA, equipping the regulator with the powers needed to supervise an industry-funded permanent entity as it assumes OBL's legacy responsibilities. The shift from a competition-enforcement mechanism to a statutory financial-services oversight model represents not merely administrative housekeeping but a philosophical repositioning: open banking is no longer being treated as a corrective intervention in a dysfunctional market; it is being recognised as permanent infrastructure for the broader financial system.
The Man in the Chair
Britton's appointment brings a biography unusually well-suited to the complexity of the task. He served as the founding chief executive of the government-backed Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), an institution created in the wake of the Kalifa Review of UK Fintech to accelerate the country's fintech agenda at the highest policy levels. Before stepping down from that role, he had already accumulated an entrepreneurial track record as co-founder of the venture builder Collectively Better and of the lending fintech Neyber, as well as years of experience as a software engineer and venture capitalist. In 2022, he was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to diversity and young people — a recognition that speaks to his influence well beyond the technical corridors of financial services.
As chair of the Future Entity Design Steering Group, Britton will preside over a coalition that OBL is convening from across the industry. That group, comprising more than 30 banks, fintechs, and payment service providers, is mandated to deliver a comprehensive blueprint addressing the Future Entity's operational scope, governance structure, technical capabilities, and funding mechanism. Achieving consensus across such a commercially diverse coalition — where large incumbent banks, challenger neobanks, and specialist payment service providers hold fundamentally different competitive interests — will demand precisely the kind of credibility and diplomatic authority that Britton's cross-sector background provides.
Variable Recurring Payments and the Open Finance Horizon
The timing of the Future Entity's design process is not incidental. The market is pivoting rapidly from static data sharing toward real-time account-to-account (A2A) payment infrastructure, and the standards environment has not kept pace. Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) sit at the centre of this transition. First-generation sweeping VRPs enabled automated fund transfers between a customer's own accounts; commercial VRPs (cVRP) extend that rail decisively further — to recurring bill payments, utility subscriptions, and e-commerce checkout flows. In utility billing specifically, cVRP enables direct debiting based on exact monthly meter readings rather than fixed estimates, protecting consumer cash flow while simultaneously eliminating the card-network interchange fees that billers have absorbed for decades.
The Future Entity is being designed to establish standardised interface rules and technical uptime benchmarks that can accelerate cVRP adoption at scale. Beyond payments, it is intended to serve as the structural backbone for expanding data sharing into broader open finance verticals — pensions, insurance, and wealth management — sectors that remain largely outside the existing OBL framework but represent the next logical and commercial frontier.
What This Means for the Industry
The appointment of Britton and the formalisation of the design process marks the point at which UK open banking transitions from a regulatory mandate into a self-sustaining market institution. For the more than 11 million monthly users already embedded in the ecosystem, the promise is continuity and expansion. For the banks and fintechs participating in the steering group, the design process is both an opportunity to shape standards that govern their competitive environment and a test of whether the industry can govern itself with the coherence that statutory oversight now demands. The FCA's formal supervisory role under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 provides the backstop, but the texture of the new regime — its ambition, its commercial pragmatism, its technical rigour — will be determined in the working group that Britton now chairs. The UK's open banking story is entering its most consequential chapter.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.