In this special edition of the Open Banking Expo Unplugged podcast, to coincide with the #GivingTuesday social media campaign running throughout November, Ellie Duncan is joined by Kieron James, founder and CEO of Wonderful, who explains how the online giving platform has implemented Open Banking-enabled account-to-account payments to achieve 100% fee-free charitable donations. Sacha Deshmukh, CEO of Amnesty International UK, also joins the episode to reveal the organisation's interest in Wonderful and Open Banking payments to save on card processing fees and administrative costs.

Ellie Duncan is joined by Saba Shariff, head of new product development and corporate strategy at Symcor, Rafael Schur, a partner at EY Latin America South and Mick Smothers, a managing director who serves as principal architect for the Banking and Capital Markets practice within EY’s financial services IT consulting team to discuss how there is a lot to learn from Open Banking experiences around the globe with many geographies in various stages of implementation. From Singapore and Japan, to the EU, UK and Australia, the approach to Open Banking has been varied, each attaining different levels of success. Though Canada has its own unique set of regulatory, industry and constitutional frameworks to consider, valuable information can be gathered from implementations in USA and Brazil that can ultimately help to define and accelerate a ‘made-in-Canada’ model of Open Banking.

On this episode, Ellie Duncan is joined by Ron Morrow, executive director, retail payments supervision at the Bank of Canada to discuss the newest core function to supervise payment service providers and retail payments, the Retail Payment Activity Act. Ron explains what it will mean for PSPs, both in Canada and outside of Canada, and how the central bank has engaged with industry on its supervisory approach. He also discusses how the Act will fit alongside other initiatives, such as Real-Time Rail and Open Banking.

In this episode, Sara Costantini, managing director at CRIF, reveals some of the main findings from its latest research, 'Banking on Banks'. She tells Open Banking Expo's Ellie Duncan why UK consumers, in particular, view banks as "a second line of defence" after the government and where banks are falling short in helping consumers amid the cost-of-living crisis. Finally, she discusses what banks across the UK and Europe can learn about how to use Open Banking technology to deliver the right products and services to their customers.

On this episode, Ellie Duncan is joined by Kareem Refaay, managing director for MENA & GCC at The London Institute of Banking & Finance, which aims to promote financial inclusion through delivering bespoke programmes that provide finance qualification in fintech, digital transformation, sustainable finance and financial literacy. Kareem shares more about the work of the Institute, as well as their recent partnership with the Abu Dhabi Global Market Academy to provide solutions that cater to education and training needs of the banking sector in the MENA and GCC regions.

On this episode, Siamac Rezaiezadeh, senior director of product marketing at GoCardless joins Ellie Duncan to discuss the many types of payment fraud, including identity fraud, and the size of the problem in the UK.

Laura Heritage, Open Banking and API leader at API management platform Axway, joined Ellie Duncan on Open Banking Expo Unplugged to explain how the emergence of the "API economy" has driven innovation and fostered new business models around data sharing. She also discusses how the market-driven approach to implementing Open Banking in the US is playing out and how upcoming Open Banking mandates will offer further clarity on how to participate in the Open Banking economy. Finally, she talks about Axway's work with Brazil on its Open Banking implementation to ensure that it didn't become a check-box exercise.

Gabby Macsweeney, head of brand and communications at Codat, tells Open Banking Expo's Ellie Duncan about the main findings from its latest report, 'Open for business: the case for a new approach to Open Finance that works for SMBs’. She reveals what the research uncovered about the benefits and limitations of Open Banking for SMBs, including why there needs to be a rethink about the datasets shared through Open Finance for small businesses. Finally, she discusses where she is seeing data being used particularly effectively in products or services for SMBs. Please click here to download the report.

Matt Komorowski, who joined Volt earlier this year as chief revenue officer after a decade at PayPal, tells Open Banking Expo's Ellie Duncan about the real-time payments opportunities for both consumers and merchants. He explains why account-to-account payments have gone mainstream so rapidly in Brazil and India, and why the UK needs more clarity from the regulators on the timeline for variable recurring payments in order to encourage commercial use cases.

Mat Mytka, who recently joined FDATA Australia and New Zealand as regional director, tells Open Banking Expo's Ellie Duncan about what New Zealand can learn from Australia's CDR implementation as it goes down the same route, and why some of the biggest Australian banks have often perceived CDR as more of a threat than an opportunity. He also reveals what he thinks might accelerate global multi-stakeholder learning on Open Banking and Open Finance in the face of slower-than-expected progress, at times.