The United Kingdom's open banking architecture is entering its most consequential structural transition since the regime was first mandated nearly a decade ago. Ezechi "Ez" Britton has been appointed independent chair of the steering group charged with designing the country's new open banking standard-setter — a body provisionally known as the Future Entity — marking a decisive step away from the enforcement-led framework that built the market and toward a mature, industry-funded governance model fit for the next decade of financial data innovation.
The Future Entity will assume the core standard-setting, performance monitoring, directory, and certification functions currently held by Open Banking Limited (OBL). Crucially, it will operate as a dedicated non-profit organisation under the direct supervisory authority of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), giving the UK's open banking ecosystem a permanent statutory home for the first time in its history. Its mandate will extend well beyond the API maintenance and compliance monitoring that OBL has managed: the Future Entity is explicitly designed to drive commercial open banking models and to lay the technical foundations for broader open finance capabilities spanning pensions, insurance, and wealth management.
From CMA Order to Statutory Framework
To understand why this transition matters, it is necessary to revisit the architecture the UK is moving away from. Open banking in the United Kingdom was born not from primary legislation but from a regulatory enforcement action. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) 2017 retail banking market investigation order compelled the nine largest current account providers — collectively termed the CMA9 — to construct secure, standardised application programming interfaces (APIs) enabling authorised third-party providers to access customer data and initiate payments with explicit consent. The Open Banking Implementation Entity, later rebranded as OBL, was created to execute that directive.
The framework worked. By any measure, it established the UK as an early global benchmark for structured financial data access. But its legal architecture was always bounded: the CMA mandate applied only to the major retail banks and focused narrowly on basic payment and account data access. The market, however, has long outpaced those boundaries. Open banking in the UK now counts over 11 million active monthly users — a figure that underscores how thoroughly adoption has escaped the gravitational pull of the original nine-bank enforcement perimeter. That scale demands a governance structure with commensurately wider authority and a sustainable funding base that does not depend on CMA mandate compliance alone.
The legislative answer is the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, under which secondary legislation formally transfers long-term open banking oversight to the FCA. This statutory shift equips the regulator with explicit powers to supervise the Future Entity as a permanent, industry-funded institution — providing the kind of durable legal clarity that neither the original CMA order nor OBL's interim status could offer. The design phase is now well underway, with OBL acting as a neutral coordinator convening a coalition of over 30 banks, fintechs, and payment service providers to produce a comprehensive blueprint covering the Future Entity's operational scope, governance structure, technical capabilities, and funding mechanism.
Britton's Appointment: Why This Choice Signals Intent
The selection of Britton as chair of the Future Entity Design Steering Group is itself an editorial statement about what the UK wants this institution to become. Britton is not a career regulator, nor a veteran of incumbent banking. He is the founding chief executive of the government-backed Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), established in the wake of the landmark Kalifa Review of UK Fintech — a body explicitly created to translate fintech policy ambition into commercial reality. Before leading CFIT, he co-founded the venture builder Collectively Better and the fintech firm Neyber, and spent formative years as both a software engineer and a venture capitalist. He was awarded an MBE in 2022 for services to diversity and young people.
That biography places Britton squarely at the intersection of technical credibility, commercial innovation, and policy implementation — precisely the combination required to chair a process that must simultaneously satisfy incumbent banks, challenger fintechs, consumer advocates, and the FCA. His appointment signals that the Future Entity is intended as a growth-oriented institution, not merely a compliance utility.
Variable Recurring Payments and the Open Finance Horizon
The strategic context for the Future Entity's creation is the market's accelerating shift from static data sharing toward real-time account-to-account (A2A) payment infrastructure. Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) sit at the centre of this transition. First-generation "sweeping" VRPs permitted automated transfers between a single customer's own accounts. Commercial VRPs (cVRP) extend that rail significantly — enabling recurring bill payments, utility subscriptions, and e-commerce checkouts to operate over direct bank-to-bank channels. In the utility sector specifically, cVRP enables direct debiting based on exact monthly meter readings rather than fixed estimates, protecting consumer liquidity and simultaneously eliminating card network interchange fees for billers. The economic stakes of standardising this infrastructure at scale are material for both consumers and businesses.
By establishing standardised interface rules and enforcing technical uptime benchmarks, the Future Entity is designed to provide the regulatory clarity that commercial VRP adoption currently lacks — and to serve as the structural backbone for the eventual expansion of data sharing into open finance verticals including pensions, insurance, and wealth management. What began as a competition enforcement tool in 2017 is being reengineered into a permanent, forward-looking financial infrastructure institution. The appointment of Britton to lead the design phase is the clearest signal yet that the UK intends to treat that infrastructure as a genuine strategic asset.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.