Like many European bank bosses, Rune Bjerke at Norway’s DNB has spent years preparing for this weekend.
From Saturday, many of Europe’s banks must start allowing third parties — such as retailers, technology groups and rival lenders — to access the accounts of any customers who authorise it. The change has prompted forecasts of the biggest shake-up in retail banking since the ATM was invented 50 years ago.
For Mr Bjerke, who has run Norway’s biggest bank for more than a decade, the full scale of the challenge created by the introduction of the new EU rules only became clear after he visited China with his top management team a couple of years ago.
He says that meeting Alibaba and Tencent and seeing how quickly the technology groups had become dominant operators in China’s $5.5tn payments industry made him recognise how serious the risk was of a US tech titan such as Facebook swooping into DNB’s market.
This threat is coming into closer focus for European banks this weekend when the EU’s second payment services directive (PSD2) comes into force across most of the continent, opening the door for tech-savvy rivals to pounce into the sector.
“It is becoming a global competition, with Facebook, Google and Amazon as well as smaller fintechs competing with bits and pieces of the banking industry,” Mr Bjerke says. “With PSD2 we will be attacked even more by these fintechs and international players.”
