Nordea has set up a site for developers to experiment with the bank's Open Banking APIs in a quest to become the "go-to hub" for banking APIs in the Nordics.
In launching an API platform, Nordea is seeking to capitalise on the ground-shaking changes to the European payments landscape envisaged under the forthcoming revisions to the Payment Services Directive (PSD2). Under the rules, banks will be obliged to provide licensed third parties with secure access to customers’ accounts.
States the bank: "We see this as an opportunity to embrace the changing landscape. Our goal is to strengthen our collaboration with fintechs and go beyond the regulation by providing premium APIs which fit your needs."
The first two APIs out of the hatch include a payments initiation API for integration with third party Web services and an account information API. The bank has set up a bespoke site where developers can register and request access to a sandbox environment for testing prior to live production.
Within 24 hours of going live, the site had registered 130 expressions of interest from third party developers.
Jarkko Turunen, Nordea's head of Open Banking says: "Open Banking will fundamentally shift banking in the way internet banking did more than a decade ago. We will see many new ways of distributing banking products. In the end this creates more choice and value for customers."
The first iteration of the portal is active in pilot mode, with a full-scale launch planned for Q1 2008, in line with bank compliance deadlines for PSD2.