Cryptomathic Blog

Open banking can offer opportunities for retail banks that are faced with competition from newcomers to the banking and finance industry. For those unfamiliar with what open banking is, it can be best defined as “the use of open APIs that enable third-party developers (FinTech or non-banking service providers) to provide applications and services around the financial institution.” These services may be located between the customer and the bank, or placed in the bank’s bank-end.

Globalization has continued its seemingly inexorable march over the last decades. Movement of capital, labor, ideas, goods and services across borders has made the world smaller. International and multilateral organisations create the rules that define and guide interactions between peoples and nations. Parallelly, we are seeing another revolution - the digitizing of our economy at a breath-taking pace.

Financial institutions and solution providers are busy implementing the requirements of Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) under the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and the Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS).

A fundamental objective of the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) has been to reduce the risk of fraud to the maximum extent possible and ensuring security for electronic payment transactions.

New digital portal streamlines banking client onboarding while addressing AML, eIDAS and PSD2 requirements.

With the introduction of PSD2, banks are forced to provide third party payment service providers (PSPs) with access to the bank’s customers’ account information for account servicing and payment initiation services, but only in the case where the user has granted access to these third-party players. This article explores a technical solution that leverages eIDAS to address the PSD2 requirements.

In November 2018, ETSI published the new version of standard ETSI TS 119 495 - Sector Specific Requirements Qualified Certificate Profiles and TSP Policy Requirements under the Payment Services Directive (EU) 2015/2366. The standard was expected by financial institutions and trust services to allow secure communication in the context of Payment Service Directive 2 (PSD2).

The eIDAS Regulation has been designed with an aim to optimize digital business practices while simultaneously enhancing security for all users. It allows for better cross border operational compatibility and improves the flow of information which makes the modern economy tick. We have discussed many such aspects of eIDAS in previous articles, but in this two-part series we explore some real-world applications through a few case studies. Here we look at how businesses in the finance and logistics sectors can benefit from the various tools that eIDAS provides.

PSD2 breaks up the ways in which banks do their business, by forcing them to open up their APIs. By doing so, PSD2 challenges the way in which data was traditionally secured in banks.