Open Banking CX Guidelines
Project Overview
The Open Banking Customer Experience (CX) Guidelines project aimed to create a unified ethical and usable experience across the UK’s new data-sharing ecosystem. Working with the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE), we designed the CX standards, journeys, and service transformation recommendations that shaped how millions of people consent to share their financial data securely.
The aim was to embed Data Trust by Design principles into the UK’s regulatory and service frameworks — ensuring that consent, control, and comprehension were at the heart of Open Banking.
Key challenges
- Balancing positive and negative friction to create trust without compromising usability.
- Aligning UX outcomes to Data Trust by Design metrics.
- Designing across 51 user-journey variations spanning 9 ecosystem participant types (banks, fintechs, aggregators, etc.).
- Codifying consent to meet compliance under GDPR and PSD2.
- Providing transformation guidance for a diverse ecosystem of service providers.
Process & Methodology
This was a deeply collaborative, systemic design program grounded in both human-centred and value-sensitive approaches.
Methods included:
- Multi-stakeholder co-design workshops with regulators, banks, and fintech innovators.
- Ecosystem mapping to clarify participant roles, data flows, and consent hand-offs.
- Journey mapping for 51 end-to-end use cases.
- Development of a design system and component library to support consistent implementation.
- Iterative playback sessions to align technical, regulatory, and design perspectives.
- Continuous synthesis into a guidelines repository hosted on the OBIE website.
Results & Impact
This work has gone on to shape the consumer experiences of millions of UK banking customers, setting a global benchmark for ethical data sharing experiences.
- Standardised CX across the Open Banking ecosystem, improving user comprehension and confidence.
- Framework adopted by major banks and fintechs, influencing later data-sharing initiatives including Australia’s Consumer Data Right.
- Recognised as a benchmark for ethical data experience design and informed the global conversation on responsible data ecosystems.
- Enabled the OBIE to publish a living standards framework that continues to evolve with the industry.
Reflections & Learnings
This project crystallised my understanding of how policy, regulation, and design interweave in shaping public trust. It was an experiment in designing systems that hold moral intent through to implementation — bridging regulatory logic with lived human experience.
It also laid the philosophical groundwork for my further work on the Consumer Data Right in Australia and ongoing explorations into Data Trust by Design as a core design framework for the digital economy of the future.