The Open Banking Revolution

The transformation of banking services is setting a new trajectory for a hyper relevant target – personalised wealth management. Two ground-breaking pieces of legislation, PSD2 and GDPR, are causing a shift in the mental model for all who engage in designing the methods of high value, trusted digital engagement in Financial Services.

Considering personal data as a shared asset that must be safely managed as it is shared, processed and stored across a consent-driven, API-enabled ecosystem, is the new foundation being laid down by architects and developers. The approach taken by the UK’s Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) establishes the methods and specification by which the innovation of development teams will turn transactional data into valuable insights for personal financial wellbeing.

At the start of the year, our partnership with the team at OBIE led to ForgeRock developing, hosting and managing a Reference Bank Application. This service enables Third Party Providers registered with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to test and demonstrate their Open Banking capabilities. The necessary application process to the FCA is the first step towards registering with the Central Directory and in reality it takes weeks before teams can start to test and validate APIs. Clearly time to market with new functionality is a critical factor for success, so in collaboration with OBIE, ForgeRock is accelerating the innovation of Open Banking. Today we have announced the introduction of a fully compliant directory which makes the technical sandbox immediately accessible for development teams to gain instant access to the specified APIs.

Whilst opening up access to this technical sandbox for organizations looking to build and test Open Banking APIs, our ForgeRock development team has created a valuable new resource, the Open Banking Technical Solution Guide available on the directory. 

The UK is leading the way with Open Banking which is expanding geographically across the EU with PSD2, into Australia with the Consumer Data Right and beyond that, across other vertical sectors including Utilities and Telecommunications. Open APIs represent an enormous opportunity for organizations to create ecosystems of value for customers and ForgeRock remains uniquely positioned to provide leadership on how to create digital trust. Extending our Model Bank with the ForgeRock Open Banking Directory, to enable streamlined access for third party providers to test functionality, is a catalyst for more innovation. Our team is excited to expand our work with Open Banking, enabling global players in the financial markets to gain immediate validation of their design strategy, demonstrating the power of our technology to advance the industry.