ForgeRock Access Management 5.1 Delivers Open Banking Requirements for Financial Services

The great thing about building on top of a standards-based identity platform is that organizations can focus on adding compelling business value further up the stack rather than spending cycles implementing foundational technology. This kind of flexibility becomes increasingly important across any number of business sectors as digital identity takes on a greater role in supporting the customer experience. Gartner tells us that the identity and access management space is evolving “beyond supporting traditional web applications to support mobile applications and APIs, as well as adding contextual and adaptive access features.” And that “by 2019, more than 80% of organizations will use access management software or services, up from 55% today.”

The increasing focus on digital identity is driven in large part by customer engagement, yes, but also as a means to maintain competitive agility in a fast-changing regulatory environment. In the financial services world, for example, there are seismic shifts taking place, whose epicenter is the UK (Open Banking) and the EU (PSD2), but with effects that are rippling out across the world. At the heart of this revolution is the opening of APIs to allow greater access to customer data, interoperability and competition. Underpinning these APIs is a standards-based security architecture powered by OAuth2 and OpenID Connect.

What we have delivered with the release of ForgeRock Access Management 5.1 is an enhanced OpenID Connect Provider (OP) that has new capabilities to power some of the great new services and payment models which will be the result of Open Banking and PSD2. Building on the MFA-capable, highly customizable OP of previous versions, 5.1 now additionally supports signed and encrypted Request Parameters via JWTs or URI, a key capability in the payment initiation use case, where users really need to know who is requesting payment, why, and for how much. Encrypting this means the sensitive data is kept secret and signing ensures payments arrive tamper-free from a trusted party.

With ForgeRock, banks can partner with third-party providers, so customers get all the services they want in one trusted place. Customers have a single identity across the whole business that they can use to access services and to decide what to share, creating a seamless, secure, and personalized user experience that builds banking loyalty. Banks and customers alike can rely on strong authentication in tandem with real-time, responsive, situational risk assessments to protect customers and their data.

With the clock ticking on the implementation of Open Banking, ForgeRock customers can focus on delivering business-specific logic, confident in the knowledge that they’re building on a firm and powerful foundation that is the ForgeRock Identity Platform.

For detailed information, please see the ForgeRock Access Management 5.1 documentation.

Learn more about ForgeRock Access Management.