Open Finance Oversight and Supervision: Emerging Practices and Early Lessons
Open finance holds transformative potential—enabling consumers and businesses to share their financial data securely across providers, driving competition, innovation, and financial inclusion. But realizing these benefits depends on one critical condition: effective oversight. This working paper argues that supervision must be built into the foundation of any open finance framework, not treated as an afterthought.
Combining in-country work with global desk research and stakeholder interviews, this paper brings new insights on the supervision of open finance. The objective is to inform policy and regulatory design in emerging markets and developing economies by drawing on insights from more mature open finance systems. It also fills a knowledge gap in open finance supervision—one of the key topics of discussion in financial inclusion policy.
This paper identifies the core supervisory priorities financial service authorities should focus on in the early years of implementation:
- Monitoring API performance and ecosystem health.
- Ensuring that consent journeys are transparent and fair for consumers.
- Guarding against fraud and data misuse.
- Tracking whether open finance helps achieve the stated policy objective.
These priorities reflect a broader shift in supervisory philosophy—from monitoring rule compliance to actively monitoring whether open finance is delivering on its stated policy goals.
