Digital identity is critical for the implementation of PSD2 in particular and Open Banking in general. After all, if you cannot prove who you are to a bank or third party provider, how can they provide you with access to

There is a common view that Blockchain is the answer to every IT (and other!) problem that is out there. Most of us have heard of Bitcoin which uses the Blockchain concept to manage a crypto currency, however, in this

Our previous blog described the options banks have in offering testing environments to comply with the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) and offer open banking link. Here we discuss the advantages of offering a read/write sandbox to Third Party Providers

Our previous blog described the architecture banks must provide to comply with PSD2 and offer open banking link. Here we discuss how banks are proposing to on board and provide testing access to Third Party Providers (TPPs) and others

Over 40 years ago, the banks were one of the first industries to fully embrace the potential for computing to improve their businesses. For this reason, they have built up very complex systems and processes around those systems that have

There are always risks to any innovative endeavours and the provisioning of Open Banking / PSD2 Ecosystems and Developer portals is no different. Here we discuss these risks and the potential to mitigate or even eliminate those risks.

Technical Risks

As Open Banking / PSD2 comes into force, the banks that have embraced open banking (and fintech in general) as an opportunity rather than a threat are attempting to engage with the development community, both individual developers and larger development

Many banks have been toying with Open Banking for a number of years now as a way to improve the customer experience, however, they are generally trying to do this only for their own customers. As a concept, this is

The Introduction of Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) brings a lot of change for financial institutions, but what does Open Banking mean for the consumer?

Open Banking as a concept is targeted such that individuals or large and small businesses

 There is much talk in banking circles about what is being called ‘Open Banking’, but what does this mean to consumers, banks and intermediaries and what is the relationship with the EU’s Payment Services Directive V2 (PSD2)? In this series

The Situation

A number of banks in Europe have come together around the Payments Services Directive Version 2 (PSD2) to form the Open Banking initiative with a view to creating Open API Standards for UK Banking.

The rollout of these

Testing has always been a critical part of the development lifecycle but never before has it become so critical due to the pressure of delivering high quality software and avoiding a roasting on social media when applications go wrong. Organizations

Many large organizations today have expensive back office IT infrastructures that are difficult to replicate and thus are a scarce resource. As with all scarce resources, they are valuable and thus each usage of that infrastructure incurs a cost which

The new Payment Services Directive II (“PSD 2”) deadlines are getting closer and thus there is a focus from banks to ensure they can be compliant when the axe falls in January 2018 when all financial services institutions should be

Offshore development and/or testing of applications is now used by the vast majority of large organizations to reduce costs and to leverage the skillsets of valuable off shore resources. This will normally require that the offshore organization has some access

Encouraging innovation is a cornerstone of all organizations that are seeking to take part in the digital economy. Innovation brings new ideas to the table which in turn result in new processes which are supported by new or improved applications

Agile development teams often share test environments which is nominally a cost effective solution as test environments are, by their nature, quite expensive to provision. But is this really the most cost and time effective way to provide capability to

In the age of agile development, speed and quality of delivery is one of the main business drivers. Agile techniques and processes work well, however, how often do you have agile teams waiting on other agile teams to deliver? How

Payments systems by their nature are incredibly complex and expensive to create. Thus when trying to test new payments applications, accessing one of these testing environments is essential to build out new and extend existing payments applications. As more and

The concept of ‘shifting left’ in the development lifecycle has evolved out of necessity as more frequent and public delivery of applications has required an exponential increase in how much testing must be done, how often it is done and