SEB bank will provide an opportunity to manage other banks’ accounts within the SEB’s internetbank
According to the requirements of the Payment Service Directive 2 (PSD2), from September 14 banks are obliged to provide third parties access to customer account information and possibility to make payments from their accounts if customer has given consent for that. From June 14th SEB is ready to provide the technical solution rendered by the PSD2 and third parties are invited to test it.This requirement will eventually provide an opportunity for a customer to manage their accounts in other banks within one – SEB internetbank, as well as foster creation of many other new financial services in the market.
Under the Directive, licensed companies that have access to the customer data held by banks will be able to offer the new financial services – account information service and payment initiation service. It is important that the customer data held by banks still is fully protected and will be available for third parties only after the customers’ consent.
“The most important benefit for our customers at first will be the ability to access their bank account information faster and to make payment process easier. For example, for a customer with several accounts in different banks there will be no need to connect to each internetbank separately. All the information about his accounts will be available in one place – in one internetbank. Furthermore, when making a payment for a product or service online, there will be no need to log in to the internetbank. It will be possible for the customer to pay immediately without leaving the online store. Both parties – banks and innovative fintech companies – will be able to use these services. That is why we are currently inviting fintech companies as well as other market players to test our technical solution to offer new services to our customers already in autumn,” explains Jānis Dirveiks, project manager of the SEB Baltics Open Banking.
SEB bank is working not only to fulfill the mandatory PSD2 requirements, but also looking for a long term partnerships with fintech companies to offer customers other innovative financial services.
“Following the trends in the financial world and the customer expectations, SEB bank is looking for wider cooperation opportunities beyond the services set out in the PSD2. Until now service providers were able to test different ideas and services in a specially designed developer portal - seb.lv/open-banking and with limited functionality also with real bank systems – using the APIs* developed by the SEB Open Banking Initiative. After updating SEB’s APIs, this testing is now fully possible with real banking systems in line with PSD2 regulation and security requirements. We are convinced that the Open Banking approach will change the financial world, and the goal of SEB bank is to be among the first to make these changes and to inspire other companies to make more use of the available innovations,” says Jānis Dirveiks.
* API - Application Programming Interface is a set of protocols and tools for building software and applications. This abbreviation is commonly used to talk about third-party access to banking infrastructure so that they can offer their services to bank customers.
