Who Pays for What? Pricing and Monetization Options in Open Finance

By Funded4Trading — June 11, 2026 · 0 views

Who Pays for What? Pricing and Monetization Options in Open Finance As open finance expands and matures, sustainable pricing and commercialization models are essential to support performance, innovation, and growth. This brief offers a roadmap for developing pricing policies in open finance, reviews pricing practices, assesses their impact on competition and innovation, and proposes key policy considerations. View Brief View Reading Deck

AUTHOR

Rafe Mazer

24 Mar 2026

Topics

As open finance expands and matures, it must establish pathways to financial and operational sustainability. A pricing and commercialization model is therefore critical to performance, system sustainability, service innovation, and expansion to new sectors. This brief examines pricing and monetization in open finance. It reviews current pricing practices, assesses how these models influence key objectives such as competition and innovation, and considers how different open finance archetypes shape the feasibility of various pricing approaches.

The brief offers considerations for pricing policy in open finance, in addition to covering the following topics:

The four funding needs in open finance and scale of implementation costs.
Five pricing models used globally, with benefits and trade-offs.
How pricing policy supports competition, innovation, and financial inclusion.
How implementation model choices shape feasible pricing options.
Six key considerations for pricing of data exchange in open finance to be considered when developing finance policy.

Ultimately, this brief argues that policies should be designed in a way that covers the cost of implementation, fairly distributes operational expenses, and leaves new room for new firms and products to enter the open finance ecosystem while holding true to the principle of access and control of financial data by consumers.

Authors

Rafe Mazer

Director, Fair Finance Consulting

Rafe Mazer is a leading global voice on consumer protection and competition policy in digital financial services and the digital economy. For 15 years, Rafe has brought the consumer’s perspective to product design and policymaking with governments and financial service providers in countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As the first Director of IPA’s Consumer Protection Research Initiative from 2019-2022, Rafe developed a portfolio of more than 20 consumer protection research projects addressing digital consumer credit, pricing transparency, fraud in digital app stores, and other emerging risks in digital economies. Prior to his time at IPA, Rafe was the director of a Kenyan consulting firm specializing in consumer protection policy, and before that led CGAP’s work on consumer protection and behavioral research for 7+ years.

A talented researcher and writer, Rafe has designed and executed field research including surveys, mystery shopping, behavioral experiments, and randomized impact evaluations, as well as policy analysis and regulatory reforms. Rafe’s current work includes supporting the expansion of open finance models in emerging markets and the development of continental competition policy for digital markets in Africa. Rafe is currently Director of Fair Finance Consulting, which provides consumer protection and competition policy expertise to a wide range of clients and partners globally.