Fintech for open ecosystems
What is going on?
2021 changed the standard for retail payments. All major players have integrated Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), created their own payment instruments, and added operations with digital assets — where permitted by law.

Some upgraded on their own, while others established partnerships and acquired complementary products. As a result, the competitive focus has shifted from individual product features to data, speed, and ease of embedding.
In such conditions, open ecosystems have become a new distribution channel that helps independent players stand up against marketplaces and other types of centralized platforms. With the help of embedded finance, companies can implement more complex user scenarios, exchange the data they collect, and, as a result, reduce the time-to-market.
What will happen next?
Scenario 1
Independent players will refuse to team up to build open ecosystems and share data. In this case, the gap between leaders among closed ecosystems and marketplaces will continue to grow rapidly: corporations will look for partners among corporations.
Scenario 2
The development of open ecosystems will increase market fragmentation. For example, instead of one bank for all occasions, users will choose a separate bank/application for shopping, education, travel, large purchases, etc.
Limitations
Different approach to using data
Sometimes, participants of open ecosystems can’t agree on a general policy for using the data they collect.
Legal restrictions
According to regulatory requirements, some data must be anonymized before the transfer, and some data mustn’t be transferred at all.
User reluctance to share data
Companies are required to offer users a choice of which data can be collected from sites or applications and analyzed.
Duplicate solutions
Corporations often start with using third-party products and then create their own solutions, refusing to cooperate with fintech companies.
Use Cases
Last year, Digital Horizon predicted the development of account-to-account payments. This trend will continue as part of the evolution of open ecosystems.
Buy Now, Pay Later 2.0
Leaders of the installment payment plan segment are building ecosystems that accumulate data not only on user purchases but also on interactions with various brands, activity on social media, etc.

Universal checkout services
Convenient checkouts improve user experience and increase conversion rates. They act as one-key solutions: a user creates an account once and then automatically uses it in thousands of online stores.

Embedded investments
Tech products for stock market investments are also being transformed to have embedded functionality and be part of almost any ecosystem.

Fintech-based ecosystems
In 2021, fintech companies did not shy away from partnerships and/or acquisitions. As a result, the market received a complete infrastructure, the basis for new open ecosystems in different areas — from e-commerce to metaverses. This infrastructure already integrates data from checkouts, user identification systems, and embedded financial products, as well as data management tools.

Security in open ecosystems
There are new solutions that take into account the specifics of open banking technologies, whereas traditional anti-fraud systems are not always suitable for such cases. For example, in 2021, there were phishing scams where cyberthieves used text message links to obtain the victims' login credentials for their bank accounts. Then, using payment initiation service providers (PISPs), they transferred funds to other accounts. New services take into account the bottlenecks of open ecosystems.
Volt

The company launched Circuit Breaker, an anti-fraud solution for open banking. It allows merchants to block suspicious transactions and create blacklists based on set criteria, such as the bank, device, or email that the user is paying from.

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