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WHY BANKS AND LENDERS MUST LOOK BEYOND THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS TO MEET THE CHANGING NEEDS OF EUROPEANS This year’s report shows that, despite some encouraging signs of improvement, four in five Europeans still have concerns about their finances over the next 12 months. Our report reveals that the cost of living has indeed altered the ways in which people engage with and manage their money, particularly in terms of accessing online banking and other digital services. Many more Europeans are now planning to use digital tools to monitor their finances more closely going forward.

Open Finance and Open Banking are revolutionizing the financial services industry by making structured and especially unstructured data available from multiple sources. Categorization engines enrich financial transaction information by adding a “category”: a name that gives a meaningful description of the nature of the transaction. To accomplish this task, the engine classifies the data according to some sort of criteria, such as merchant, location, or transaction amount.

SMEs, and in particular micro and small companies, are an important part of the European economy. The micro and small business segment includes over 25 million companies, with a total turnover of over €10bn, and employs just under 43% of the total number of employees in the European private sector. Despite the overall size of the segment, these companies have been, up to now, challenging for banks to serve. Due to the small size of these organizations, they are often classified and treated as retail customers. This, coupled with their limited accounting and financial management capabilities, limits their ability to access finance.