FCA reports on open finance and AI

Watch out! Your money is about to get a massive shake-up. The financial watchdog has announced a bold new plan called “open finance”. It builds on open banking to give you full visibility and control of your financial assets (if you want it).

Here is what it means for investors:

• Smarter apps: fintech apps could see your whole financial life in one place, but only if you agree to connect them up.
• Better guidance/advice: the best apps could check your spending and suggest you invest more.
• Easy dashboards: a clear screen showing how your investments grow across the board.
• Lower costs: more companies entering the market means better deals and lower fees.

In the FCA’s illustration, Keiko lets a regulated advice app see her bank, savings and debt data; it assesses suitability, recommends one of its own products and a monthly amount, then tracks performance on a dashboard.

Regulators want this up and running by 2030 to boost the UK economy.

Current state of play: PRISM (Prioritisation and Real-world Insights Selection Matrix) Taskforce report

The FCA published a key report on 7 October 2026 showing how the UK will roll out open finance. The old plan set out big ideas; this new report gives us a practical toolkit called the PRISM framework. The objective of the PRISM Taskforce is to build an industry-informed assessment framework to assess the potential impact of open finance use cases. The framework has been designed to consistently describe and compare the impact of open finance use cases. Through its development, the 33 industry participants highlighted the conditions they saw as important for open finance to develop and scale. This included recurring dependencies, evidence gaps and shared enabling foundations.

What does “shared enabling foundations” mean? It is consultancy / regulatory jargon for the building blocks that need to be in place first.

• From theory to action: the FCA has a new 6-part scorecard to test if financial ideas will genuinely work.
• Shared foundations first: open finance will rely on fixed rules over data quality, digital ID, and security.
• AI and agentic finance: clean standards lay the groundwork for AI and automated financial agents to manage your money safely.
• Focus on risks: the framework measures user harm, fraud risks, and market power to protect consumers.

The FCA’s latest report follows on from its April 2026 report. These reports are summarised above by Cliff Weight, who is a member of the FCA Consumer Network Panel.

Cliff Weight, Chair of the Education Committee and a member of the Policy Committee