The Large Credit Union Coalition (LCUC) represents Canada’s largest credit unions with over 2.8 million members and $150 billion in assets, with credit unions in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and New Brunswick. The goal of the LCUC CIO group is to use their collective knowledge and national presence to provide technology leadership and innovation to enrich the financial lives of their members and strengthen the competitiveness of Canadian credit unions.
Based on timelines set out by the Canadian government, Canada is expected to have an Open Banking regime in place by the end of 2023. The Open Banking regime will allow Canadian consumers to securely share their banking data between accredited financial services providers, conditional on informed consumer consent. While optional for credit unions, the LCUC views participation in Open Banking as essential to maintaining competitive parity and enhancing member experiences.
In order to facilitate credit union participation in Open Banking, the LCUC CIO Group is seeking a partner(s) to provide an Open Banking Utility for credit unions. The Utility will include all the necessary functionality to participate in the forthcoming Canadian Open Banking regime. The use of a single national open banking utility provider would help to reduce fragmentation of technology in the system, improve bargaining power, drive economies of scale, reduce the complexity of implementation, and more. A common credit union system open banking utility would also enable credit unions to focus more of their resources and energies on creating differentiation and value for their members from Open Banking. All credit unions will be invited to leverage the Open Banking Utility on the same terms as LCUC credit unions.
To facilitate the selection of a preferred partner(s) to provide the Open Banking Utility, the LCUC CIO Group released an RFP to select vendors on December 9th 2022. Vendor responses to the RFP were due in early January. A shortlist of vendors will be selected based on the RFP responses provided and will be invited to demo their Open Banking Utility solution before the end of January. Negotiations will start in February with the preferred partner(s) and the LCUC CIO Group will provide an update to the credit union system at that time.
If you have any questions, please contact the LCUC by email or via our website.