Interoperability

The ecosystem of business models, partnerships, and revenue streams enabled by application programming interfaces that allow software systems to communicate and share data. APIs enable companies to monetise their data and functionality, create platform ecosystems, and embed services into third-party applications.

An EU legislative framework (PSD2, Directive 2015/2366) governing payment services and payment service providers across the European Economic Area. PSD2 introduced requirements for strong customer authentication, mandated open access to payment account data for authorised third parties (enabling open banking), and created new categories of regulated payment institutions.

The financial, operational, or psychological costs a customer incurs when changing from one product or service to another. High switching costs create customer lock-in and are a powerful intangible competitive moat, particularly in enterprise software, banking, and platform businesses.

The implied cost of future rework caused by choosing a faster, easier, or less thorough solution during software development instead of a better approach that would take longer. Technical debt accumulates interest in the form of increased maintenance costs, reduced development velocity, and higher defect rates.

The economic phenomenon whereby customers face significant costs, inconvenience, or barriers when attempting to switch from one product, service, or platform to a competitor, effectively binding them to their current provider. Lock-in can arise from contractual obligations, proprietary data formats, integration dependencies, learning curves, or network effects.

A regulatory and technological framework that enables third-party financial service providers to access consumer banking data through secure APIs, with the customer's explicit consent. In the UK, open banking was mandated by the CMA's Open Banking Remedy (2018) and is governed by the Open Banking Implementation Entity.

An approach to systems engineering and product development that embeds data protection principles into the design and architecture of IT systems and business practices from the outset, rather than retrofitting them. Privacy by Design is codified as a legal requirement under GDPR Article 25 and encompasses data minimisation, pseudonymisation, and purpose limitation as default settings.

Artificial intelligence systems designed to provide human-interpretable explanations of their decision-making processes and outputs. Explainability is increasingly required by regulators — particularly in financial services, healthcare, and criminal justice — and is a key differentiator for AI products seeking enterprise adoption in regulated industries.