The approach of open banking, slated to start in February 2020, is raising strategic concerns, rather than technical questions, at some of Australia's neobanks and smaller banks. Many of these newer players have either started with modern core banking systems, or have spent time and money upgrading and are waiting impatiently for results, an open banking conference in Sydney has been told.Paul Moss, GM of technology, innovation and products, MyState Bank said he was taking "a glass half empty" view of open banking after his experience with the New Payments Platform.This attitude arose after MyState invested heavily ahead of the launch of the NPP, only to find the major banks - despite their earlier promises - had largely missed the start date."We spent a lot of time and money with the NPP, [so] we've probably got a more reserved approach to open banking," Moss said."As a regional bank we only need to publish product data in July next year, and we expect to do that very easily - some would say it's already on our website. So we'll keep a watching brief on open banking.""We've got a simple product set and a simple technology stack.""Our focus now is on further simplifying our digital operations and also on robotics."Dominic Ng, an organisational psychologist at volt bank, was taking an even deeper plunge: "The tricky thing here is to decide what questions open banking will answer," he said."My concern is whether or not we've gone far enough in our design thinking around the [open banking] standards. It's when we start dealing with customers is where we'll come across the grey areas that we haven't really thought about that we have actually have to need to resolve."Open banking is really a fight for transactional accounts."The challenge for us is getting open banking to be really well understood within the organisation," said Moss."How do we monitor the usage of product data, and where it is going? The context for banking, in a declining interest rate environment means all are clamouring for transaction accounts as low cost source of funds."I have a sizeable capex amount into my budget this year, with 'open banking' next to it. I'm now in a position where I'm re-assigning some of that to robotics," said Moss."It's an opportunity cost - at this point our business will get more benefit from [software] robotics than from open banking.volt remained positive, but wary over the introduction of open banking: "we overestimate what we will get in a year and underestimate what we'll get in a decade."