TORI Perspectives Summer 17 01

Issue 7 | Summer 2017
In that sense, you can expect varying degrees of adoption
based on respective countries’ digital maturity and
localised innovation. PSD2 also lends itself to a phased
roll-out; account information provision is likely to come
before payments services. And then there’s the planned
introduction of strong customer authentication - this won’t
go-live for another year at least (January 2019). Most
commentators agree that the tipping point will be the entry
of a large social network as a Third Party Provider (TPP).
When you start receiving your account information through
Facebook and paying merchants through WhatsApp, that
moment probably will have arrived…
Coinciding with the implementation of the General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), PSD2 presents an
ideal opportunity for payments providers to balance
data access with data control… optimising sharing
and protection. How can they do this? Well, do you
remember that social network-esque agreement to
enhanced banking services? At the same time, you could
specify a right to be forgotten after a certain amount of
time, or inactivity. Similarly, consent could be subject to
constraints, like transaction size or value, cross-border
payments or credit worthiness.
So, what are the barriers? As with all financial
transactions, trust remains vital. Twinning payments
services with Amazon’s Alexa voice service might offer
an appealing new channel, but if the APIs that interact
with back-end banking services are insecure, unreliable
or unstable, customer trust will be undermined, perhaps
fatally. A successful move to Open Banking will need highperforming,
high availability and permissioned solutions
that comply with data-related legislation.
Through APIs, Open Banking allows businesses to open
their digital doors to anyone with a good idea. But in
the context of banking, they also present some serious
integration challenges. That new payments API still has
to work with core banking systems (amongst others) to
provide the very data upon which account information and
payments are reliant.
Uber brought disruption to the taxi business. PSD2 and
Open Banking can revolutionise the payments experience,
but it’s unlikely to be through a single banking service
provider; incumbent or not.
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