The National Australia Bank Ltd (ASX: NAB) share price is sliding this morning. This comes as the company teams up with three other global banks in a bid to boost its fintech capabilities.
The big four bank, along with NatWest of Britain, CIBC of Canada, and Brazil's Itau Unibano, have launched a challenge to identify potential new fintech partners.
They are inviting fintechs and other innovators to put forward ideas which could revolutionise banking.
Let's investigate further.
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What is NAB's latest fintech push?
In a potential positive for the NAB share price, the bank, alongside its strategic partners in the push, will launch an "open finance challenge" to "prototype new customer solutions".
In addition, the team will also join with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in launching the challenge. As a result, NAB believes the move would help share fintech collaborations outside of Australia.
Moreover, the quartet are working with each other on matters of information security, and are seeking to dive deeper into modern finance topics such as blockchain and open banking.
Open banking, a relatively new concept, allows third parties like fintechs to incrementally add value to one's personal finances, such as for investing, saving or personal budgeting. This is achieved by the sharing of data between platforms and services.
NAB chief innovation officer Howard Silby was quoted as saying on an AWS channel that open banking is a "much-discussed topic amongst banks at the moment", and that it "gives customers greater control over their data".
However, NAB's "open finance" notion takes things a step further. It aims to make "customer journeys a lot easier" in "multiple aspects of life" other than finance.
To do this, the quartet has developed a set of 28 application programming interfaces (APIs). These will allow the developers in the challenge to create apps and services, using bank data.
Applications opened on Monday, and the banks are seeking to seed 100 teams as part of the challenge, yesterday's Australian Financial Review reports.
From there, around 12 of the best proposals will be judged by the CEOs of the four banks.
NAB share price snapshot
NAB shares are now exchanging hands at $27.58 apiece, a 0.51% dip into the red from the market open.
The NAB share price has climbed 22% into the green over the year to date. It has also gained 55% in the past 12 months.
Consequently, these results have outpaced the S&P/ASX 200 index (ASX: XJO)'s return of around 25% over the past year.
