It was that they had too few banks, just a few powerful

banks.

The culture that came out of the 2008 financial crisis was very much the soil in which open banking grew.

And the thinking where open banking originated, which was in Europe, was that this concentration of wealth and power in the hands of relatively few private organizations was a systemic risk.

What they had learned in the most aggressive way was if just one or two of these giant banks ends up in a terrible position, they're going to drag down the entire economy down with them.

So this thinking was, how do we mitigate that risk? How do we create a situation where the concentration of deposits, the concentration of banking services was more spread out across a level playing field that allowed different entrants to become part of the game, thereby not only reducing the risk of having this concentration, but improving competition across the sector and allowing for innovation to flourish, creating all sorts of new kinds of banking products and better offerings for consumers who would be the ultimate beneficiaries.

Now, that's part of it, but also wrapped up in the debate was this notion of consumers owning their financial data.

Banking, says that's exactly the wrong way to see it, though.