During 2017, Open Banking went from being an idea to a fully formed project, with 20 of the largest banks subscribing to it. After our press release in June 16th calling for the first round of participants and the subsequent sign up, we rapidly got to work. By the end of the year, we had visited over 2/3rds of the European countries, visited or discussed with 17 National Competent Authorities and held or attended many working group meetings.
As a result, we were able to deliver the following:
Harmonisation
- Developed a referencing model for uniquely identifying regulated entities across member states.
- Developed a five-step process model of the key steps for access to account that is now being used across the industry.
- Developed and published an Open Banking and PSD2 Handbook along with four mini-guides.
eIDAS Certificate Standards
- Supported ETSI in creating the stable draft of the PSD2 eIDAS certificates standards that is now under review, for finalisation in June 2018.
A pan-European Directory
The ERPB’s Payment Initiation Services working group called for “A common, secure, resilient, reliable, and up to date operational directory service on a pan-European level” OBE intends to deliver this directory and to this end,
- The Directory POC, that is now available for participant testing.
- The Directory API which will allow Participants to verify that an entity is in fact regulated.
Access to this is available, to members.
Looking Ahead
PSD2 comes into force in a matter of days, although the first months will be very quiet, due to the number of exemption periods that exist and the fact that the Regulatory Technical Standards on Strong Customer Authentication and Common and Secure Communications have not yet been voted.
2018 will be a year of building rather than using Access to Account capability and there is still much work to do: National competent authorities must update and publish registers, there are still missing RTS and regulatory guidelines, ASPSPs must build working API infrastructures. We will hear more about API evaluation, and the definition of what makes a ‘good’ API.
Open Banking Exchange Europe, will be part of this work, supporting the industry to find efficient solutions that work and that meet the needs of all stakeholders. As each country becomes available, we will populate our Directory to provide a single, trusted source of standardised information.
I would like to thank those of you who have supported us so far, and I look forward to more engagement and dialogue in 2018.
John Broxis
Managing Director, Open Banking Exchange
