Open banking has moved from conference talk to project plans. Banks, credit unions, lenders and the finance teams of larger employers are now being asked to connect systems, share customer data on consent and move payments account to account. The technology question gets most of the attention. The hiring question decides whether the work finishes.
This post is for controllers, operations leaders and owners who will be asked to staff one of these projects, or who will be affected by one.
Why this is a hiring problem as much as a tech one
Open banking, in plain terms, means a customer authorizes a third party to use data held by their bank, through a secure connection called an API. The uses are practical: faster payments, real-time income checks for lending, consolidated account views, and less manual reconciliation behind the scenes.
Rules differ by country. In the US, the Consumer Financial Protection Bank rule-making under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act has set the direction for consumer data access. In Canada, the federal government has been building a consumer-driven banking framework, and timelines have moved more than once. If you operate on both sides of the border, you are planning for two sets of expectations and probably two sets of reviewers.
Whatever the rules say on a given month, the work inside the company looks similar. Someone has to connect systems, someone has to protect the data, someone has to read the rules, and someone has to make sure finance and customer teams can run the new process day to day.
The roles that carry the project
Most rollouts pull on five skill areas at once:
- API and integration developers who can connect a core banking or ERP system to outside providers without breaking what already works.
- Data governance specialists who track what data is shared, with whom, and under what consent.
- Security and privacy professionals who handle access controls, vendor risk reviews and incident response.
- Compliance and risk analysts who interpret the rules and document how the company meets them.
- Finance and operations analysts who own reconciliation, exceptions and the month-end effect of new payment flows.
The hard part is that very few people hold more than two of these. The most valuable hires are the ones who understand both the technical piece and the financial setting it sits in. A strong integration developer who has never seen a bank reconciliation will ask slow questions. A sharp controller who cannot read an API specification will approve things they do not fully understand.
Permanent, contract or both
A rollout has a shape. There is a heavy build phase, a testing phase, then a long stretch of steady running. Staffing it all with permanent hires usually means paying for peak capacity forever. Staffing it all with contractors means the knowledge walks out the door at go-live.
A split works better in most cases:
| Work | Usually best as |
|---|---|
| Integration build and testing | Contract |
| Data governance and security ownership | Permanent |
| Compliance interpretation | Permanent, with contract support at deadlines |
| Reconciliation and exception handling | Permanent, with temporary help during cutover |
The rule of thumb: if the person will still be needed in 18 months, hire them. If the work ends when the project ends, contract it, and write a handover into the engagement from day one.
Reskill what you have first
Many of your existing people are closer than you think. A long-serving accounts payable lead already knows where the exceptions come from. A reporting analyst can learn data governance basics faster than an outsider can learn your business. Reskilling also helps retention, because people tend to stay where they are given a path.
What reskilling will not do is replace specialist depth for a defined stretch of work. Security and integration in particular are hard to grow in a quarter. Be honest about which gaps can be trained and which need to be bought.
Mistakes we see in project staffing
- Hiring after the vendor is chosen. The people who will run the system should help judge it. Bring in the lead hire before the contract is signed.
- No single owner. IT, compliance, operations and customer teams all touch the work. Without one named owner, decisions sit in the gaps between them.
- Treating clerical change as an afterthought. New payment and data flows reduce some manual tasks and create new exception work. Plan where those people go.
- Ignoring Canadian and US differences. A contractor who knows one regime is not automatically fluent in the other. Ask directly.
- Underpaying for hybrid skills. The people who combine finance knowledge with technical depth are scarce. Pay and speed of decision need to reflect that.
A simple planning sequence
- List the capabilities the project needs, not job titles.
- Mark each as already in house, trainable, or needed from outside.
- Decide which outside needs are permanent and which end at go-live.
- Name one accountable owner across IT, finance and compliance.
- Start the search for scarce skills now, since specialist searches take time.
What to do next
Before your next steering meeting, put a one-page staffing map next to the technology plan. If any box reads "to be determined" for security, integration or compliance, that is where to start looking first. Traverse Staffing recruiters have placed finance, operations, and AI and data professionals for employers in Canada and the US since 1997, and we can help you scope both the permanent roles and the contract support for a project like this.