Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Rafe Mazer, researcher and author of the excellent report "Who Pays for What? Pricing and Monetization Options in Open Finance."

This episode is a deliberate step back from the U.S. open banking soap opera I've been living inside for the past year or so. 

The question of who pays for open finance isn't one the U.S. gets to answer in isolation. Other markets have been wrestling with it for years, and at some point I needed someone to make me look up. That person is Rafe. Rafe works across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and beyond, and his new report surveys the global landscape of how open finance systems get built and funded. 

It’s the closest thing to a first principles analysis that exists, and you should read it (link below).

We cover the four distinct cost stages of open finance (most countries only plan for one), plus the five pricing archetypes that exist globally, from Brazil's threshold pricing that was never actually collected to South Korea's voluntary, self-governing open banking exchange that works without a single regulatory mandate requiring it.

The U.S., despite having one of the most competitive financial markets in the world, may be poorly positioned to get this right. We also get into reciprocity, the word that never appears in the U.S. open banking debate but probably should, and what a federal data protection law would actually change.

Check out Rafe's report here: https://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/brief/who-pays-for-what-pricing-and-monetization-options-in-open-finance/

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Follow Rafe:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafael-rafe-mazer-13531b/

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson

X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson