In an interview with Finextra, ForgeRock’s VP of financial services and regulatory, Nick Caley reveals that both PSD2 and Open Banking have created a template that other countries are looking to mimic by implementing standards in Europe.
Caley also reinforced the importance of the role of the developer in this model because of how detailed APIs are in their specification, what function they perform and what data they will enable a third party to access.
“For any developer, there is a lot of guidance that is being provided in repositories that are open to developers to go through and really understand how to build an application that meets standards in order to work with a given bank or to get approval from the regulator in whichever country is their home country,” Caley said.
With the Open Banking standard now being a demand from the CMA, Caley discussed how banks have been collaborating to develop a standard that meets the security and compliance expected when transferring sensitive customer data.
“It’s all been done with a degree of demand and a very tight schedule. Banks have had to work with industry players, the government and the Open Banking Implementation Entity to really define what the standard is when making transaction history available to third parties with customers consent.”
In addition to this, Caley said that developers need to be aware of the circumstances in which the transaction history is going to be provided, the details of how the specific API will function, what data will the API call and pass and what security model needs to be applied.
Caley added: “Banks are under a legal demand to open up their systems to introduce more competition and innovation and they’ve needed to build their developer teams. This is something that is already understood in Big Tech and fintech: that the developer experience is crucial to the offering that is made for the consumer.”
He continued: “Banks have come a long way in a short time and will continue to develop their own digital capabilities internally, but they are also thinking about how to make their APIs as consumable as possible for third party developers. So, there is a lot of focus on the developer experience, so it’s not just their internal teams, it’s external developers who are going to work with their APIs.”
As financial services institutions move further along the Open Banking roadmap, the relationship that technology providers have with banks is becoming increasingly important. “I think at ForgeRock we’ve looked at a great amount internally about what a bank has to address in terms of being both compliant and then also competitive with offering a quality experience both to the consumer and the developer, an understanding we gain that because of our relationship with Open Banking.”