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The first of the UK’s high street banks to launch an API-driven marketplace for customers, TSB is leveraging its Cloud-based platform to reap the rewards of open banking, says Jason Wilkinson Brown Back in 2018, TSB must have thought the sky had fallen in after a move, heralded as the start of a brave new world, ended up nothing short of an IT, customer service and PR disaster. The UK bank’s migration of its five million customers and their 1.3 billion records from a banking platform it was renting from former owner Lloyds Banking Group, to its new state-of-the-art platform developed by its Spanish parent company Sabadell, left nearly two million customers unable to access their accounts. As a result, TSB made a thumping year-onyear loss.
At the time, it said that the ordeal would make it stronger. Fast-forward three years and the evidence very much points to that being the case. TSB is now widely acknowledged as having one of the most technically-advanced (and resilient) platforms of any of the UK’s high street banks. A jewel in its offering is the new TSB marketplace – a conduit for customers to access a number of third party-provided products and services, designed to make personal and business customers feel more confident about their money. TSB was the first of the mainstream banks to launch such a service, but the concept was one that was very familiar to its head of digital propositions, partnerships and open banking, Jason Wilkinson Brown. He’d previously spent time with the UK’s Starling bank, which made the marketplace concept central to its challenger model. “In essence, we have a one-stop shop, where the approved partners we work with can help customers improve their financial wellbeing and have better money confidence, outside of traditional
banking products and services,” explains Wilkinson Brown. Giving customers greater choice and freedoms ‘points to us recognising that the smartest ideas aren’t always inside TSB’, he adds. “By having a marketplace, we can bring best-in-class propositions to our customers, both retail and small business.” TSB had originally introduced a lending marketplace in partnership with Funding Options, just for its small business customers, in 2018. This year, it teamed up with ApTap to help personal customers save money on their bills; Wealthify to help them invest, and Legal & General to offer them life protection, while also giving businesses access through its app to Square card payment services and Enterprise Nation support. The timeliness of TSB’s marketplace can be seen in the context of changing customer needs, prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. That proved to be the ‘rocket fuel’ propelling TSB’s work with partners, according to Wilkinson Brown. ONS figures, released
lays out its stall
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