Open finance infrastructure and trust models: what changes for IAM teams?

TL;DR: Its work with Saïd Business School for the FCA Smart Data Accelerator will examine infrastructure, technology, consent, and governance models for future UK open finance, according to Raidiam. The real question for practitioners is how identity, accreditation, trust anchors, and liability get translated into testable controls before ecosystem scale outpaces governance, with a final report due in March 2026.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Raidiam: UK open finance infrastructure research with Saïd Business School and the FCA Smart Data Accelerator

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should organisations govern identity in open finance ecosystems?

A: They should treat identity as an ecosystem control plane, not a single onboarding event.

Q: Why do consent models fail in multi-sector data sharing?

A: Consent models fail when they are descriptive but not enforceable.

Q: What breaks when open finance uses inconsistent trust anchors?

A: Inconsistent trust anchors break assurance across the ecosystem.

Practitioner guidance

• Define participant identity lifecycle controls Specify how ecosystem participants are onboarded, accredited, reviewed, suspended, and revoked across the full open finance lifecycle.
• Translate consent into enforceable policy Represent consent in a machine-readable form that can drive access decisions, logging, and revocation across sectors.
• Stress-test interoperability against liability boundaries Map where operational responsibility shifts between scheme operator, relying party, identity issuer, and data recipient.

What's in the full report

Raidiam's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• The research design and how the FCA Smart Data Accelerator will test infrastructure models in the Digital Sandbox
• The alternative architecture patterns under comparison, including centrally coordinated, federated, and hybrid approaches
• The governance and liability considerations that will be examined across open finance and smart data use cases
• The implementation perspective from a regulated ecosystem operator on how testable blueprints are built

👉 Read Raidiam's research announcement on UK open finance infrastructure models →

Open finance infrastructure and trust models: what changes for IAM teams?

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