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Part of obconnect’s Product Delivery Ecosystems

Where ecosystems go next — and obconnect’s role

Ecosystems are moving in one clear direction: more products, delivered to more participants, across more sectors, on shared and increasingly robust standards. The winners will be the markets — and the providers — that get the foundations right.

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The next few years

Three shifts are already visible. First, more products on the same infrastructure — from Confirmation of Payee and payments to fraud-data sharing and beyond. Second, more sectors, as the Smart Data agenda extends the model past banking — following the same path from Open Finance and Open Data already underway within finance itself. Third, a growing emphasis on standards and robustness: the lesson from mature schemes is that the participants everyone relies on must be rock-solid before the market depends on them. Where standards leave room for ambiguity, performance and trust suffer; where they’re tight, the whole ecosystem is stronger.

The role of an orchestrator

As ecosystems grow, someone has to build and run the connective infrastructure — the directory, the trust framework, the routing, the APIs — and keep it robust as new products and participants join. That is the orchestrator’s role, and it’s what obconnect does: operating the centralised platform so banks, corporates and financial institutions can participate by connecting, not rebuilding — the same model already proving out through cross-sector data sharing.

What industry and regulators should be thinking about

The priority is foundations. Before mandating that everyone become compliant, schemes should ensure the systems participants will depend on are robust, unambiguous and performant. Tight standards, strong directories and dependable routing are what let participants deliver their own services without hitting loopholes or gaps. Get the plumbing right, and the products take care of themselves.

The commercial opportunity

For obconnect and its partners, the opportunity is to be the trusted infrastructure layer for an expanding set of products and sectors — the platform a market connects to once and builds on for years. See: Product Delivery Ecosystems.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Toward more products, more sectors and stronger standards, under the UK's Smart Data agenda.

A provider that builds and operates the shared trust infrastructure so participants connect rather than build their own.

Robust, unambiguous standards and dependable directory/routing infrastructure before scaling participation.