Open Banking and data reassurance: the case of tenant referencing in the UK

Abstract

The promise of Open Banking (OB), as implemented in the UK, has been that consumers are no longer passive data producers but can also use and derive value from their personal data. OB has been applied predominantly to financial decision-making, payments and borrowing, and most of the existent literature has focused on its adoption in financial services. In this article, we examine its off-label adoption in tenant referencing, a sector rather neglected and that raises specific questions of distribution to essential goods. We draw on qualitative research from a research project examining algorithmic risk profiling in housing, comprising in-depth interviews with landlords, letting agents, tenants, referencing companies and other stakeholders in the private rented sector (PRS). Taking into account simultaneously consumers and professionals’ perspectives, we argue that OB adoption in tenant referencing is a calculative practice embraced due to offering a more streamlined application process, having a reassuring interface design and institutional validation. Such technical and social elements overlap on the specific power relations of the rental market that make in some situations OB less as an ‘opt-in’ option and more like a default setting when tenants feel that they do not have too much control over what data they want to share.

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