Beyond Open Finance: Connected customer journeys were the big theme at UK Finance's Digital Innovation Summit

The recent UK Finance Digital Innovation Summit focused on the key tech-enabled trends emerging within the financial services market, making it an ideal event for PEXA to be part of.

For much of the last decade, innovation has focused on digitising individual products and processes. But across the opening keynote sessions, panel discussions and industry debates, it is clear that the conversation is increasingly shifting from digital products to connected customer journeys.

Whether discussing Open Finance, Smart Data, artificial intelligence or digital identity, speakers repeatedly returned to the same underlying challenge: how can organisations securely share trusted information in a way that reduces friction for customers making important financial decisions??

From digitisation to interoperability

The themes of interoperability and trust ran consistently throughout the event, and we heard that technology alone is no longer seen as the biggest barrier to transformation. Instead, the challenge is enabling data, organisations and systems to work together across traditional industry boundaries. 

Meanwhile, as financial services become increasingly data-driven, trusted digital identity, customer consent and robust governance are becoming essential foundations rather than optional enhancements. 

Another prominent theme was practical delivery, with many sessions focusing on moving beyond pilots and proofs of concept towards real-world implementation, rather than future gazing topic. It seems success will depend on collaboration across regulators, financial institutions, technology providers and adjacent sectors. 

There was also recognition that Open Finance is maturing. The industry is now clearly moving beyond asking whether Open Finance should happen towards identifying the customer journeys where it can deliver the greatest value.

Why home buying is being identified as a key frontier

Few customer journeys illustrate these challenges more clearly than buying a home, and this was a use case that was mentioned by several speakers as an area of significant opportunity in respect of developments such as smart data and tokenisation. 

Home buying brings together multiple organisations that have traditionally operated independently: lenders, brokers, conveyancers, estate agents, surveyors, HM Land Registry and technology providers. Each participant plays an important role, yet information is still repeatedly collected, verified and transferred throughout the transaction. The result is a process that remains lengthy, fragmented and uncertain despite significant investment in digital services. 

However, the dynamics of the market are changing. Government reforms to modernise home buying, Smart Data initiatives, advances in digital identity, property data standards and Open Finance are all beginning to converge. Together, they create the opportunity to move away from disconnected processes towards a genuinely connected home buying journey whereby trusted data could be securely reused across the transaction. Rather than treating finance, property information and completion as separate activities, they could become connected stages within a single customer experience.

PEXA’s perspective: connecting the journey

It was against this backdrop that PEXA’s session at the Summit explored what may become the UK’s most compelling Open Finance use case. Speaking on the Innovation Stage, PEXA’s Julian Wells argued that the opportunity extends well beyond improving mortgage origination. 

Buying a home is one of the largest financial decisions consumers ever make, yet the process still behaves like a relay race. Transactions average around 120 days, around one in three fail, and valuable information becomes trapped at every handoff between participants. As the presentation highlighted, the problem is not a shortage of information, it is the absence of trusted mechanisms to reuse it. 

Our session highlighted that three distinct capabilities are now beginning to align: 

• Open Finance establishes financial readiness, giving lenders confidence around affordability and available funds. 

• Trusted property data establishes asset readiness, through initiatives such as digital property information, sales packs and digital logbooks. 

• Completion infrastructure provides transaction readiness, enabling funds to move, ownership to transfer and registration to complete. 

Individually, each capability delivers value. Together, they create the foundations for a connected home buying journey that consumers experience as a single process rather than a series of disconnected transactions.