At a panel session chaired by Milly Zameta, Which, at the Smart Data Forum, four experts - Colin Griffiths, Citizens Advice; Faith Reynolds, Devon Fields Consulting; Colin Strong, Ipsos, and Kate Wells, Money and Mental Health Policy Institute - sat down to unpick one of the most repeated assumptions in open finance: that consumer trust is the barrier standing between smart data and mass adoption.
What they said was more uncomfortable. And more useful.
The panel opened with a challenge to the framing. Colin Griffiths made the point bluntly: people use services they don't trust all the time. The smart meter rollout is the clearest example. Energy suppliers had customers. They had engagement. When they asked to install a meter that collected significantly more data, large numbers said no - not because the technology was flawed, but because the underlying relationship wasn't strong enough to carry the ask.
That distinction matters. Passive use isn't the same as active trust. And building on passive use as if it were active is how data strategies fail.
Kate Wells reframed the consumer starting point entirely. People don't begin with trust. They begin with a question: what do I get from this? Confidence in a system builds over time, through experience. Trust follows. It isn't a precondition - it's an outcome.
Colin Strong went further, arguing that trust in institutions is structurally declining, while trust in individuals within those institutions remains relatively stable. What's replacing institutional trust isn't nothing - it's verification. Demonstrate to me why I should work with you. Show me the accreditation. Show me who's accountable. Show me what happens if it goes wrong.
That is what Invela is built to provide.
Colin Griffiths presented research that cuts through one of the most persistent misreadings of consumer behaviour. When asked whether they want the ability to opt out of data sharing, 92% of people say yes - almost everyone. When you look at how many actually do opt out of smart metering data, it's single figures.
Industry often interprets this as consumers not really caring. That reading is wrong.
What the data shows is that the ability to change their mind is what gave people the confidence to engage in the first place. The opt-out portal most people never visit is doing structural work - not because it's used, but because it exists. As Colin Griffiths put it: tech companies have learned this. They build dashboards most users never open, because users love knowing they're there. It increases engagement.
This is directly relevant to how consent architecture in open finance should be designed. The goal isn't to minimise the off-ramp. The goal is to make the off-ramp visible, because visible off-ramps increase uptake.
Kate Wells made a point that should be written into every product design brief in the sector. One in two people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their lives. That isn't a niche demographic. It is the general population, at different moments.
She described two research participants with similar mental health conditions responding to a crisis in opposite ways: one wanting automated systems to carry on uninterrupted; the other wanting to withdraw from everything. And the same person might respond differently at different times.
Systems that can't accommodate that flexibility - that assume a stable, consistently capable consumer - are not fit for purpose. And the more data they hold, the higher the stakes when they fail.
The panel's sharpest exchange came on redress. Colin Griffiths described a case he sees repeatedly: a consumer has a problem with smart metering data. The energy supplier says it's the data platform. The data platform isn't covered by the energy ombudsman. The ICO isn't built to handle individual consumer complaints at scale. The consumer has nowhere to go.
Faith Reynolds noted that this isn't new. Liability and redress in smart data was flagged in the government’s first consultation in 2019. A further paper was written on it in 2020–21. It's now 2026, the data market is significantly more complex, agentic AI is entering the picture, and the gap is still open.
This is the structural problem that Invela exists to close. When data moves horizontally across sectors - through open banking, open energy, open property - and regulation governs vertically within them, liability has to land somewhere. Without clear traceability, without infrastructure that tracks who accessed what, when, and under what authorisation, redress is impossible in practice even when it exists in theory.
A narrow door in and a very wide journey for that data once it's shared - as Faith Reynolds put it - is not a trust problem. It is an infrastructure problem.
Everything the panel identified as a barrier to consumer adoption of smart data is, structurally, a problem that Invela’s network infrastructure is positioned to address:
The consumer isn't the problem. They are, as the panel concluded, remarkably consistent - they want control, transparency, accountability, and a clear route when things go wrong. Those are not unreasonable asks. They are exactly what a functioning ecosystem should provide.
Invela is the infrastructure layer that makes open finance trustworthy - accrediting who's in the network, monitoring risk in real time, and ensuring liability lands in the right place. Open finance, covered.
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