What is the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ?

The CMA, or Competition and Markets Authority, is the competition regulator in the UK. It is a non-ministerial government department that is responsible for strengthening business competition and preventing and reducing anti-competitive activities.

The CMA was instrumental in paving the way for Open Banking in the UK. Its 2016 report found that older and larger banks do not have to compete hard enough for customers’ business to the detriment of smaller and newer banks and that these established banks could essentially charge over the odds for substandard or out-of-date services.

A series of measures to ensure customers benefit from technological advances and that newer providers could compete more fairly were subsequently introduced, one of these being the requirement for the major banks (CMA9) to implement Open Banking.