EXCLUSIVE—Tech giants have already figured out open banking, and more than the growth of fintech firms, this should make financial incumbents nervous.

“You don’t need a banking license, which some of them have, to [create] financial services that people use: services like Amazon Lending, PayPal Credit, whatever it is,” Louise Beaumont, strategic advisor for SapientRazorfish and co-chair of the TechUK Open Bank Working Group, told Bank Innovation. “They’re all skinning the financial services cat, and they’re doing it in a way that works for them and their business model.”

This includes the use of APIs, which, Beaumont argues, companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Uber already have a much firmer grasp on than banks and other financial services companies.

That understanding is more dangerous than most banks might think as open banking becomes more mainstream.

This is due to the simple fact that companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Uber seem to have a different point of focus than banks when it comes to APIs: these companies are honing in on the technology’s potential, while financial service companies appear to have a different worry.

“What the incumbents are doing is saying, ‘we’ve got to be is compliant,’ because they’ve learned over a period of time, that they have got to be [compliant],” Beaumont said. “Ultimately, compliance is a good thing, and as organizations they are engineered towards compliance. But, they have totally lost characteristics like imagination, creativity, and I would argue, courage.”

Larger technology companies lack that problem, Beaumont said, using Uber as the textbook example: a company that did not focus on compliance when building out its app, but also did not focus primarily on the technology.

This is what banks need to learn, Beaumont said.

“If anyone ever talks to you about open banking and all they ever talk to you about are APIs and the technology or regulation, they are heroically missing the point,” Beaumont said. “You know this to be true, because I’m willing to bet that you have never once got out of an Uber going, ‘look at the API on that.’ Uber had the imagination to think beyond an individual point of an individual experience, and go, ‘how could I just make the whole thing better?’”

Before they can start, however, incumbents also need to stop denying that companies like Amazon, Uber, and Facebook are becoming their competition — denial that is once again perpetuated by their focus on compliance, according to Beaumont.

Amazon, Facebook, and other such companies “are not scared of financial regulation,” Beaumont said, the top barrier most bankers cite as the reason such companies will never make it in banking.

That’s not to say banks should give up working  on APIs and open banking.

“As a function of the fact that open banking comes in as a regulation on the 13th of January next year, there is a big focus on being API-enabled, the knitting of the APIs,” Beaumont said. “In the same way that drains are important in cities, this stuff is important.”

Tech companies, according to Beaumont, have already figured out that foundation —and are now “applying it to things you didn’t know you were looking for, at unmet and underserved needs,” she said.

Should banks wish to keep their footing in banking, they need to do the same.