Understanding the role of open banking in digital tenant profiling

This paper examines open banking’s (OB) emerging role in digital tenant profiling. We focus on England’s rental market within a changing international context of newly adopted OB frameworks. OB is regulated in the UK, but the evidence base, and public awareness lag the expanding use cases. OB enables access to banking information in real-time and is being used in housing for digital tenant referencing platforms to access often intimate and detailed banking data via third-party interfaces to make inferences about tenant credibility. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with technology providers, landlords, agents, insurers and tenants, the paper explores OB’s role in reinforcing digital hierarchies that shape housing access. Contributing to the growing literature on platform real estate and the impact on rental systems, and exploring the intersection with open finance, the paper highlights problems of data privacy, the volume of data required to get a home and, counter to the prevailing idea of OB empowering consumers, the limited control tenants have in the market. The paper also emphasises the growing imperative placed on tenants to manage their banking and other accessible data, or what Fourcade and Healy’s term their eigencapital, in the Ordinal Society. This system, though marketed as neutral, recasts tenant selection producing winners and losers and raises ethical concerns about privacy, autonomy and fairness.