Nordea open banking goes live

Nordic Bank Nordea has started a pilot scheme to use real customer data as part of its open banking programme.

Since last year, the bank has worked with more than 1,000 external developers to test and refine its open APIs and associated services, which laid the foundation for trialling services with live customer accounts.

Nordea will now work with third parties to build applications on top of the APIs and, together with pilot customers, confirm that all aspects of the open banking solution work as expected.

Pilot data is currently limited to Finnish customers, but will soon be expanded to include customers throughout other Nordic countries.

The bank is the latest financial institution to respond to new European open banking legislation (PSD2), which requires banks to allow third-party services access to customer accounts where requested.

Erik Zingmark, co-head of transaction banking at Nordea, said: “The new PSD2 regulation will fundamentally change banking. Banking will be different as from 2018, when banks have to open up to third parties to offer services to account holders.

“We view PSD2 as an opportunity, which is why we have made a significant effort in building the open banking platform. We see possibilities to offer our customers new services together with partners, and we could offer our customers services in geographies beyond our home region.”

The third-party applications will be able to retrieve account information details and initiate payments through a payment initiation service.

End-users will be able to authenticate themselves, giving consent to the third-party provider to access their accounts.

Last year, Swedbank opened its doors to work with fintechs and developers by launching tests of its own open banking platform.