The European Union’s second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) was supposed to build bridges between traditional banks and electronic money institutions (EMI). It meant that banks would no longer have a monopoly on their clients’ data and would be obliged to collaborate with third-party providers.
According to Andrej Zujev, the founder of Forbis Group, a Lithuanian IT solutions provider for the financial sector, the move to developing an open banking system has been seen as a total failure.
“In developing all our systems to work with the open banking rules, we have run into the fact that it is a lot of noise about nothing,” said Zujev in a company statement. “It is poorly prepared and incomplete. It is absurd. I am convinced the EU’s open banking project has zero future if key changes are not made.”
Serious talk on how to revive the EU’s open banking project is needed. One is to introduce an ISO standard for open banking in the EU – a strict, universal specification: “Just like with SEPA notifications – they have ISO standard 20022 and everything is clear. You do the work once and know it will always work. It should be the same for open banking.”
The other, admittedly ambitious, proposal is to give every open banking participant a single point of entry. “A TPP would connect to its central bank or SEPA payment system provider and be able to access all Europe’s banks. Easy and clear. That would be a real open banking revolution,” Zujev said.