Australia's next generation of so-called neobanks are relying on open banking to lift their businesses from niche players to serious mainstream banking contenders. At the same time the trend continues towards further collaboration between these emerging challengers and their larger, more established incumbent banking competitors and other financial services providers. Speaking at an Open Banking and APIs Summit in Sydney yesterday, a panel of founders and senior executives at some of Australia's both more established and newest banking licence holders explained that the launch of open banking and the Consumer Data Rights legislation was crucial to their next phase of growth. There are now more than a dozen fintechs that have taken on the moniker of neobank in Australia, the conference delegates were told - and this in a potential market of just 18 million adults. By way of comparison, according to Paul Chapman, chief executive officer and founder at Moneytree, a provider of open banking and data management services to financial enterprises in Japan, his company has no direct competition for a market of over 100 million potential customers. This raised the question: does Australia need 18 tech-based neobanks? John Pountain, chief technology officer at Xinja, countered this with the comment that there was room for fintechs to specialise and still be profitable. "We don't need 18 million customers," he said. That is, fintechs are nimble enough to pick off a piece of the financial services pie and survive. He did concede, though, that his business plan relied on having clean access to data, rather than resorting to screen scraping. Andreas Piefke, chief data officer at emerging SME lender Judo Capital, was also locked onto the next phase of open banking regulations. He said "what's most important here is getting access to the market. [Open banking] levels the playing field if we can trace our product uptake." Other banking regulations, such as ease of switching rules are expected to help neobanks, almost exclusively, to the detriment of the major banks. However, despite initial optimism, some panellists conceded they are well short of becoming their customers' main bank. This is so even if some other products or services are being offered: that is, stickiness for these banks was defined by where a customer's salary or transactional accounts were housed. Judo, which already offers loans and term deposits for its SME customers, has room to grow: "Not until our customers bring their transaction accounts over to us can we be considered an SME's main bank," said Judo Bank's Piefke. Nevertheless, Australia fintechs are