The open source movement has had a profound impact on software development. There are millions of open source codebases available on Github where its audience of 30 million developers can access, review, collaborate and build better code together.

In that same spirit, Fintech Labs (formerly OBR Webcheck) has begun opening its user experience best-practice database to everyone interested in improving their digital banking experience (see note 1). We call it the Open Banking UX Initiative or OPEN BUX for short.

A little background. During our 20 years obsessing over digital banking details, we’ve developed more than 400 best-practice guidelines in five major areas:

  • Public website
  • Online banking
  • Mobile banking
  • Account opening/onboarding
  • Emerging features (e.g., voice, chatbot, etc.)

We use these guidelines to score and certify financial institutions delivering excellent digital banking. We are making all 400+ guidelines public over the course of the next few months. The first set of standards were released this week, 100 best-practice guidelines for account opening and onboarding. We are in the process of posting them to our website in a wiki format updateable by the community. To get them right away, simply provide your name and email and we’ll send you a PDF right away.

Why are we doing this? Selfishly, we are looking for more clients to certify their digital banking via our BUX Certification process (note 2, 3). But we also want to help the industry get better at serving customers digitally. We believe the country is overbranched and the roughly $1,000 each household pays annually for branch services is a drag on the industry and overall economy. Money movement is already almost entirely digital and we’ll all be better off when banking services are too.

But to get there, customers must feel 100% confident in your ability to deliver flawless information and services digitally. That’s where OPEN BUX comes in. We look forward to your participation.

Notes:

  1. Although anyone is free to see the guidelines we use to evaluate financial institutions, we are not releasing the proprietary algorithm that determines whether financial institutions meet the 80% threshold to become certified.
  2. Financial institutions pay FintechLabs to go through the certification audit. For pricing see here.
  3. Star One CU is our beta client for the certification process.