The Digitisation Committee of the Bahrain Association of Banks (BAB) has discussed the opportunities and challenges and the potential future of the open banking system in Bahrain 

 

The digital panel discussion titled “Catching the Open Banking wave: The opportunities and challenges in Bahrain”, brought together experts from the banking, fintech and regulatory sectors. Dr Wajeeha Awadh, Group Chief Digital Officer at Al Baraka Group, moderated the panel.

 

Dr Yousif Almas, Head of Digitisation Committee at the Association and Group Chief Innovation Officer at Bank ABC, in his keynote address noted that such discussions are important for fostering digital innovation in the financial services sector in Bahrain. 

 

Charting the course

“Since Bahrain was the first country in the Middle East to issue open banking regulations, it's good to look at our progress and chart the course ahead with industry leaders and key stakeholders,” he said.

 

Yasmeen Al-Sharaf, Head of the FinTech & Innovation Unit at the Central Bank of Bahrain, highlighted the lack of adequate promotion of open banking among banks as a concern. She urged banks to prioritise open banking in their strategies and to promote the concept. In addition, she indicated that monetisation could be achieved through rewards and loyalty programmes or charging for premium, underlining the need to boost open banking to increase innovation opportunities for the financial services and fintech sectors.

 

Ali Ghuloom, Group Head of Technology at NBB, emphasised that open banking is an ecosystem responsibility and not only about banks. He noted that there are two types of banks, those who want to go the extra mile and those who only want to comply, suggesting that Machine Learning and AI can be applied to understand customer behavior and generate revenue through fintech partnerships.

As an open banking provider and a representative of the fintech perspective, Dalal Al Rayes, Founder & CEO at Spare, highlighted the lack of clear onboarding processes, lack of user awareness, and friction in user experience as the core challenges that open banking is facing currently, stressing that improvements are needed in the quality of data and interface should be more user-friendly.

 

Awareness programmes

“The forum has come up with recommendations, which included the necessity to focus on providing awareness programmes on the benefits of services that utilise open banking capabilities, encouraging the outlook of open banking as an integrated ecosystem and not only perceiving banks responsible for its adoption, simplifying implementations and unlocking data that are critical for digitising financial services,” said Dr Almas.-- TradeArabia News Service