(Computer world UK) -- US tech giants Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google - or FAANG as they are collectively known - have shown little appetite to jump into the UK's financial services market under new open banking rules, according to the Implementation Trustee for Open Banking, Imran Gulamhuseinwala.
"I think we don't yet know [why], because the big tech firms have not been particularly vocal as to what they intend to do in the open banking space," he said, while speaking on a panel this week during the Innovate Finance Global Summit in London.
Any company wanting to offer open banking services, such as a money management app that accesses customer's financial data, would have to register with the implementation entity and be verified by the FCA to participate in the ecosystem.
"Any entity that is interested in coming into the ecosystem has to put their head above the parapet in our world because only authorized entities can use open banking," Gulamhuseinwala said.
"To be honest, I see relatively limited interest from the traditional big tech firms with regard to open banking."
Gulamhuseinwala believes there to be two reasons for this.
"One, we are in Europe, and in Europe the nature of the debate around customers' relationships with their data and precisely where, particularly big social media and search platforms sit, means that actually, they're doing quite well out of the access that they have to consumers' data already, and their ambition to get more data, specifically more sensitive financial services data, doesn't really appear to be there."
Shots fired. The second reason, he thinks, is "that they really struggle to look at each geography independently".
What he means is that if these companies want to launch a financial services product they would have to tweak it for each geography at present, something they may not have the appetite to do until these regulations converge.
