Implantação do open finance no Brasil: desafios e efeitos potenciais

Abstract

The Open Finance Initiative (OFI) appears in Brazil in 2020, as an initiative of the local Central Bank with the goal of encouraging innovation, promoting competition, increasing the efficiency of the National Financial System, and promoting financial citizenship. The new system allows clients to share their private data across different financial institutions through APIs, with the potential for facilitating the comparison between prices of financial products, allowing the costs reduction by the infrastructure share between financial institutions, and reducing the cost of migration for customers who wish to change financial institutions. As OFI is a recent phenomenon, and the literature on this topic is scant, this study analyzed the implementation of OFI in Brazil with the objective of identifying the effects of the new system on the business model of traditional Brazilian banks. In order to achieve this objective, 25 interviews, involving two groups of employees, one of Technical Analysts (TAs), and one of Cash Management Managers (CMMs) , from one of the five largest Brazilian banks, were conducted. The answers were analyzed using Content Analysis, proposed by Laurence Bardin, seeking to identify convergences and divergences between the perceptions of these two groups of employees. Respondents from both groups pointed out that OFI is prone to promote increased competition between financial institutions, although it could also increase the economic and financial results of traditional banks, provided said institutions employ successful strategies for prospecting new clients, increase customer loyalty and customer profitability. On the one hand, answers from CMMs highlighted the importance of improving the quality of service, and the emphasis on client-bank relationships as a strategy for prospecting new clients and building customer loyalty. On the other hand, answers from TAs emphasized the importance of the suitability of the products and services offered for each client, and the strategic use of data obtained through Open Finance to provide greater integration of financial products and services in people's daily lives, through the use of data analytics. As the strategies proposed by the TAs require time for their complete implementation, data obtained in this research suggests that traditional banks tend to maintain their current business model in the short term, with emphasis on humanized customer relationship. On the long term, however, it remains possible that banks would lean towards gradually migrating their business model to a more automated and integrated one.