News and events
Nick Green sits down to talk all things standards with the FPC’s Lewis Byford
At last month’s Verve Transformation event, I got the chance to sit down with Lewis Byford for the Financial Planning Podcast to talk about Criterion’s core mission.
You can listen on:
If you look through our website, you’d probably conclude that we build and manage data integration standards – blueprints that allow APIs built by different organisations to plug-and-play together. And, of course, you’d be right: our standards support literally billions of transactions each year, covering everything from protection quotes and new investment accounts through to transaction reporting and remuneration statements.
That means that we’re part of financial services’ infrastructure. Our standards are built to last, and to evolve over the decades as the market landscape is continually moulded by regulation, product innovation and consumer preferences. Standards developed in the 1990s, pre-dating the widespread commercialisation of the internet, are still in high-volume use today, whilst one of the most recent saw its first implementation go live this year.
We’re really proud to be part of the plumbing like that; but it’s not the very core of our mission. No: running through everything we do, like the letters through the proverbial stick of rock, is collaboration. Criterion exists to bring stakeholders in the life, pensions and investments industry together, to solve problems that none can solve alone.
You can see that in how standards help reduce market frictions, lowering costs for providers, advisers, suppliers and – critically – the consumer. But you can also see that in how they create a platform for innovation. By defining commonly-agreed foundations, standards free up bandwidth and capacity to innovate their products and propositions, reaching more trading partners and – again, critically – consumers that would otherwise be possible.
That’s pretty extraordinary when you think about it. Instead of adopting a beggar-my-neighbour mindset, the providers, advisers and tech firms that we work with understand that they can do more than just grab a bigger share of the pie for themselves: by working together, they can grow the size of the pie itself.
It is Criterion’s privilege to sit at the heart of this, helping the industry do more, together.
