Open banking. It's a term we started to hear about at the end of 2016 and since 2019 interest has remained high. That's according to Google Trends. Along with those searches, the related hot topics were PSD2 and APIs.

Regulation and technology is opening up access to bank accounts for payers, billers, and service providers. But the state of that openness varies by region and country with important consequences for billers, merchants, and their payment providers.

In this wide ranging discussion, George and Duncan Barrigan, Chief Product Officer at GoCardless, cover a range of topics, all through the lens of the company's primary value proposition, the use of direct debit from bank accounts to enable recurring and one-off payments across 30 different countries.

As you'll appreciate, stitching together a network capable of using the domestic low cost rails (think ACH and BACS) in 30 different countries to provide both domestic and cross-border recurring payments is no easy task.

Topics discussed include:

• The definition of open banking
• What the impact of open baking has been
• Where open banking is taking off, and where it isn't
• Recurring payments defined and use cases
• APIs and integration
• How a biller or merchant can move customers from one payment method to another
• Cross-border direct debit
• And, of course, the GoCardless value proposition, something its financial backers believe in given its recent $95 million raise.