Open Banking Is Mostly Plumbing — and That's the Point

5 MINS

The first time I joined a working group on Open Banking, half the room was talking about "transforming the customer experience" and the other half was arguing about token expiry. Three years and a lot of regulator letters later, I'll tell you which half was actually shipping product: the token-expiry people.

The product is the contract, not the screen

Open Banking is not a feature. It is a contract — between a bank, a third party, a customer, and a regulator — that says specific data will move under specific conditions, with specific consent, and that someone will be liable when it doesn't. Most of the work is making that contract real in code.

That is why I spend more time on these things than on a polished screen:

Consent lifecycle: who granted what, when, and how do they revoke it?

API stability: a third party that breaks every time we ship is not a third party for long.

Liability handoffs: when a payment fails, the dashboard is fine. The phone call is not. The "experience" only works because the plumbing does. Get those wrong and your beautiful onboarding screen becomes a complaint ticket in three months.

What I look for in a backlog

Backlog grooming for an Open Banking team isn't a creative exercise. It's a triage exercise. I usually ask three questions on every story:

Does this move us closer to a regulator-friendly state? If not, it's a "nice to have" by definition.

Does this remove a class of customer complaints? A single fix that kills a category of tickets is worth ten cosmetic improvements.

Does this make the next change easier or harder? Stories that quietly add coupling — a hardcoded scope, a one-off mapping — are the ones that come back as incidents. If a story can't answer at least one of those, it gets parked. Backlog real estate is finite.

Why FX changed how I think about products

Before CBA, I spent two years scoping a cross-border FX payment platform at American Express. FX teaches you a humility you don't get from CRUD apps. The price moves while you're talking. The settlement window can close on you. The "edge case" is sometimes 3% of your volume on a Tuesday.

The lesson I carried into Open Banking is simple: money products are unforgiving. There is no "we'll fix it in the next sprint" when a payment lands in the wrong ledger. So you over-invest in observability, idempotency, and reconciliation — and you under-invest in cleverness.

A short summary for new POs in this space

If you are stepping into a Product Owner role on Open Banking or payments, three pieces of advice:

Read your own incidents weekly. They are the only honest source of truth.

Pick a partner integration and become annoyingly fluent in it. The detail compounds.

Treat regulators as users with very long memories. The flashy work in this space is rare. The boring work is what keeps the lights on.

The Quiet Craft of Picking Payment Rails

Paul skipped presentations and built real AI products.

Paul K Paul was part of the March 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 17 other talented participants.