Ecospend, the UK fintech powering open finance ecosystems, has landed the first Government open banking contract awarded, which outlines HMRC’s future needs to streamline and automate parts of its payment processes to reduce errors and minimise fraud.
Additionally, the fintech is looking to improve ease of use for all UK taxpayers and users of HMRC web-services, as well as reducing costs for HMRC itself.
Simon Lyons, Head of Ecosystem Engagement at the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) said: “Today marks a big step forward for adoption as it will help bring the benefits of open banking to the entire UK population. In this instance, the use of open banking technology will revolutionise the often time-consuming manual process of filling in tax returns and will dramatically streamline the processes through automation.
“It is also just another example of the potential of open banking to provide a tangible benefit to consumers. This effort will also serve to deliver on ministers’ policy intentions to increase the overall capability of and competition in the UK’s banking and payment systems.”
The bank transfer journey is not currently integrated with the group’s online services, which leads to consumers having to open their own open banking accounts, heightening the possibility of mistakes happening.
Metin Erkman, founder and CEO of Ecospend added: “Since founding Ecospend, we have spent the last three-years focused on building our underlying technology and API in-house. Because of this, we’re now able to provide the best solutions, such as our account-to-account payment system for HMRC. But, this is just the first step, we understand if we’re really looking to deliver on the promise of open banking, innovation needs to happen at an ecosystem level and that’s what we’re here to do.”
