There is a document sitting on the FCA’s website, published this week, that could reshape how every mortgage in the UK is originated over the next five years. It is called the Open Finance Roadmap. It is not a consultation paper or a vague statement of intent. It is a plan, with timelines, named use cases, and a clear direction of travel.
And mortgages are at the centre of it.
What has actually happened
The FCA has published its Open Finance Roadmap, setting out a structured programme of work between now and 2030. The document describes how the regulatory framework will evolve to allow consumers to share financial data, securely and with their permission, across the full range of their financial life. Not just current accounts, as open banking does today. Everything. Mortgages, pensions, savings, investments, insurance.
Two priority use cases have been named above all others: SME lending and, critically, mortgage access.
The FCA is explicit about this. It will examine “how open finance can help consumers manage and improve access to mortgages.” A discussion paper on the first formal open finance scheme is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, with a longer-term regulatory framework being developed alongside HM Treasury through 2027.
What open finance actually means in practice
Open banking, which launched in the UK in 2018, gave consumers the ability to share current account data with third parties. That is why a lender can now see three months of bank statements at the click of a button, why budgeting apps can pull in live transaction data, and why some mortgage lenders already accept open banking data in place of paper bank statements.
Open finance is the same principle applied to everything else. Your pension. Your ISA. Your outstanding mortgage. Your insurance policies. Your savings across five different providers.
The practical effect for mortgage brokers is significant. Today, a complex mortgage case means gathering statements from multiple sources, piecing together a financial picture from documents that arrive at different times in different formats. Under open finance, that picture could be assembled automatically, with consumer consent, pulling live data from every relevant provider.
Think about what that means for a remortgage. Rather than asking a client to locate their current lender’s statement, their latest pension valuation, and three months of payslips, a broker could, with the client’s permission, pull a complete financial snapshot in seconds. The assessment would be richer, the advice better informed, and the process less grinding for everyone involved.
The mortgage TechSprint already happened
This is not entirely theoretical. Back in November 2025, the FCA ran a mortgage-focused TechSprint through its Smart Data Accelerator, in partnership with data infrastructure firm Raidiam. Firms were given a live environment to simulate and test mortgage data sharing. The FCA has since been digesting those outputs.
Open banking has already demonstrated what happens when data sharing gets embedded in a market. Payments using open banking grew 53% year on year in 2025. There are now around 17 million open banking users in the UK, close to one in three adults. That growth did not happen because regulators mandated consumer behaviour. It happened because the products built on open banking were genuinely more useful.
The same dynamic will play out in mortgages, but over a longer timescale and with considerably more complexity.
The numbers behind the ambition
The FCA cited McKinsey research in the roadmap suggesting open finance could generate between 1% and 1.5% of UK GDP by 2030. A separate estimate from Open Banking Limited and EY puts the combined economic impact of open banking and open finance at £7.4 billion a year within five years.
The FCA is careful to note that both figures depend on adoption rates that have not yet materialised. That is honest. But the direction is not in doubt.
Britain is also moving faster than its peers. In the EU, the Financial Data Access regulation (FIDA) remains in trilogue negotiations, with implementation unlikely before 2027. In the United States, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s equivalent rule is mired in legal challenge and has effectively stalled. The FCA is publishing roadmaps and running sprints while other regulators are still arguing about scope.
What changes for brokers, and when
Nothing changes immediately. The regulatory framework for open finance will not be in place until 2027 at the earliest, and the practical infrastructure, the APIs, the consent mechanisms, the data standards, will take further time to build.
But the trajectory is clear, and the firms that will benefit most from open finance are the ones that start thinking about it now.
For mortgage brokers, the questions worth considering are not technical. The technology will arrive whether or not you understand how it works. The more important questions are commercial. If a lender can see a client’s complete financial picture automatically, what happens to the advisory role? Does richer data make advice better, or does it risk commoditising the recommendation? If the friction in mortgage applications reduces dramatically, what is the remaining value that a broker provides?
The FCA’s roadmap does not answer those questions. It was not designed to. But it makes the questions more urgent.
Open banking took years to move from regulatory obligation to practical consumer habit. Open finance will take longer still. But the mortgage market has a long memory for moments when the ground shifted and most people were looking the other way.
This is one of those moments.
Source: FCA Open Finance Roadmap, published 14 April 2026: https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/corporate-documents/open-finance-roadmap
FCA Press Release: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-sets-out-vision-open-finance