The diffusion of account aggregation in the banking industry and its related issues: Discussing the perspective of central and peripheral actors

Understanding the process of diffusion and adoption of innovations, regardless of their nature, is a question that has animated the literature for decades (Rogers, 1976). Indeed, innovations, be they technological, or organizational, are usually scrutinized and often sought by organizations considering the impact they have internally or beyond the borders of the organization.Yet, as noted by Makkonen et al. (2016), the current state of the literature still provides limited understanding on the actual process of adoption of innovations by organizations. Likewise, we have little insight into how this process unfolds in specific settings, such as conservative industries. Finally, we can also note that certain types of innovation may give rise to an adoption process that will also be different. In the context of this paper, we propose to focus on the case of data-driven innovations defined by (Wong & Ngai, 2024) as innovations that “use any type of data to create value in the innovation”. Among the values highlighted by the authors is the ability to extract insights from data, make them more explicit and translate them into something that will be of greater value to the customer. This paper seeks to answer the following question: How does the adoption process of data-driven innovations unfold in highly regulated industries such as the banking industry. To answer this question, we build on the case of account information services providers (AIS) which have emerged in the year of 2010 with main actors primarily based in France, in Sweden, in the United Kingdom and in Spain. Account aggregation aims at giving users a consolidated view of all their bank account information, even when such accounts are held within different banks. It also facilitates for users the management of their personal financials (Bitrián et al., 2021). Account aggregation, like all innovations, is characterized by the complexity of its description. It was described by past studies as a service innovation (Chardain & Vitari, 2023), it is also described in practice as a technological innovation or even a regulatory innovation. In the case of this research, we consider it as a data-driven driven innovation and the startups providing it as data-driven startups (Hartmann et al., 2016). Few years following their emergence, the industry formed by account aggregators experienced on the one hand a wave of concentration with many providers being acquired by incumbent banks while the remaining ones-initiated collaborations with banks. Our investigation allows us to identify three phases, characterized by the relative prevalence of different motivational drivers and mechanisms leading to the emergence and dissemination of the innovation and allowing us to discuss the responses of banks. The observation of these phases leads us to conceive banks not as a single entity, but as a group comprising both peripheral and central players. On this basis, we then present a sequential response process in which peripheral players seeking legitimacy and better market positioning first intervene to adopt the innovation, they are then followed by central players seeking to maintain their position in the market