More banks are opening up to open banking and the idea of sharing data, at least abroad.

Lloyds Banking Group plc this week rolled out a new open banking functionality for its mobile banking app, allowing customers to view their current accounts from other providers within the app.

The company said Lloyds Bank and Halifax customers can now securely see their current accounts from seven other providers — including HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays — without having to go through multiple logins. More banking providers will be added in time, a release from the company said.

Customers can add accounts to their banking app using the Open Banking connection. “They simply choose the account provider, log on to the service and select the accounts that they want to share (their login details for other banks will never be shared),” the release said.

RBS introduced the same Open Banking functionality in December. Barclays has rolled out a similar feature while HSBC has launched a similar capability but through a separate, standalone app.

Stephen Noakes, Transformation Director, Lloyds Banking Group, said in a statement: “Bringing Open Banking technology into our apps is the next step in a series of exciting new features designed to make it easier for customers to manage their money online.”

Additionally, the open banking fintech startup Bud announced this week it secured $20 million in Series A funding from investors including Goldman Sachs and HSBC, as well as other banks scattered throughout the world. Bud, based in London, U.K., provides a platform for users to find cost-effective products by allowing banks and other financial institutions to share certain data on a customer’s financial habits, with permission from that customer. In turn, the data-sharing aspect allows banks to come up with new financial products to target current and potential customers.

But how long until open banking makes the splash in the U.S. that it’s already making in Europe?

Ernst & Young’s Open Banking Opportunity Index, released in January, found that in the absence of a strong regulatory mandate, U.S. financial institutions will need to define standards themselves to avoid delaying adoption. The U.S. placed fourth in the index overall and, despite uncertainty surrounding cybersecurity, data privacy and regulation, stood apart when it came to innovation, where it placed first, and consumer sentiment, where it placed second.

EY’s index found the U.S. has a “thriving” fintech industry, as 141 fintechs received venture capital funding rounds in the last three years, and banks and fintechs filed 128 patents in 2017. The U.S. led all the other nine markets surveyed, the index said.

Joshua Siegel, Managing Director and CEO of StoneCastle, the investment firm powering Cambr, a platform that helps neo-banks and fintechs launch and scale-up through a network of community banks, told Bank Innovation that banks are only starting to wake up to the present, never mind the future.

He said he’s asked bankers at industry conferences for years to raise their hands if their bank allows someone to open up an account with Facebook or Google. For years, nobody ever raised their hand, to which he would say, “Isn’t that kind of silly? Because almost every other online business does.”

Siegel said it wasn’t until late 2018 that someone finally raised their hand.

“I actually had to call him out,” he said. “The whole room went quiet. They looked at the guy.”

He said banks are missing out because they are, by nature, in the personal relationship business, particularly community banks.

“Someone’s willing to give you all of their personal life,” Siegel said. “They’re willing to give you who their friends are, what their hobbies are, what their kids look like. You don’t want that information? Really?”

Mike Massaro, CEO of global payments firm Flywire, told Bank Innovation banks “shouldn’t be scared open banking is going to kill the bank.” He said the motivations behind the shift toward open banking aren’t centered around the disruption of banks, and that the phenomenon can lead to more fruitful bank-fintech partnerships.

“I draw a lot of parallels to the wireless operators because everyone thought they were going to become just a dumb pipe,” he said about previous technology-driven shifts in that industry. “And, yet, some are more powerful today than they’ve been in the last 20-something years.”

He said the wireless operators moved around content or “innovated around their quote-unquote rail.”

“They are more critical to the day-to-day life of businesses and consumers today than they ever have been,” Massaro said. “I feel like banking is going a similar way.”

He said services like those provided by API developer Plaid and other fintech startups have opened up banking access so that accounts can be linked together and certain types of payments can be made seamlessly.

“I think those are great innovations and I think that’s where the whole industry should go,” he said. “Whether it should go there because of the standardization, or the regulatory reason, or just because it’s the right thing to do.”