All the answers about Open Banking technology, use cases, users, PSD2 / PSD3, and Open Finance.

What is Open Banking?

Open Banking is the standardized legislation that allows all of us to take control of our own financial data. We can choose to share our banking information with trusted third parties to get the financial products and services we want faster, cheaper and more easily than we do today.

What is PSD2?

PSD2 is a directive from the European Union, which sets requirements for banks and businesses in the financial services sector to improve consumer protection, make payments safer and more secure, and drive down the costs of payments services.

What is BankingSDK?

BankingSDK is the main product of Exthand in the Open Banking sphere. BankingSDK « hides » the complexity of each bank’s API and provide you a simple, secured and unified API you can interact with.

  • More than that, BankingSDK is not a SAAS platform but a Docker Container running inside your own cloud infrastructure.
  • Your customer’s data never transit and thus are never stored on our servers.
  • Banking is the most secured open banking solution on the market.

Why BankingSDK is not an aggregation tool like the others?

Traditional open banking providers are SAAS platforms: You connect to their APIs, they connect to the banks in your name, get the data, store the data and send back the data to your servers.

BankingSDK is a Docker container, which does execute inside your own cloud infrastructure. You don’t have to connect on our servers, you don’t have to save your credentials on our servers, you even don’t have to save your data on our servers.

This is the most secure banking connectivity tool on the market, worldwide!

What happens if I don’t have a license?

If your company is currently not regulated, you can still use Open Banking technologies based on our Gateway product. Exthand’s Gateway is using Digiteal’s licenses to access banks and get transactions, balances or initiate payments. Using the Gateway is quite straightforward after the completion of a KYB process.

Open Banking APIs vs Premium APIs.

There are two ways to connect to a bank.

  • The first one is to use the open banking related APIs. You have to be regulated by your NCA and become a TPP (Third Party Provider) able to access Account Information and/or Payment Initiation services. Once TPP, you can reach APIs in the name of your customers (PSU) and get balances, statements, etc.
  • The second option is through direct bank API (Premium API, Institutional API, Private API, etc). To be granted an access to those APIs you must partner with each banks. Once the partnership is done, you can access the API using your customer’s certificate.

Premium APIs offer more services and functionalities than Open Banking APIs, but sometimes they also have a cost while the Open Banking ones are free. At Exthand, we do support connectivity to both types of APIs.

Is BankingSDK visible to my customers?

No.
BankingSDK is an API container. You have to design the screens and manage the UX yourself to handle the user interactions.

This is a huge gain vs traditional approaches : your users will never see an Exthand screen which is nice for user retention and trust.

Do I need a specific license to use BankingSDK?

No. If you want to connect to Open Banking APIs, you have to be regulated by your NCA (National Competent Authority) and get in Europe for example the licenses 7 and or 8.

To connect to Premium APIs you’ll need a certificate created by the bank you want to connect to. We already have lots of deals with banks, let’s have a chat about this. You can reach us on sales at exthand.com .

How may I add connectivity to a new bank?

At Exthand, our roadmap for connectors delivery is customer driven. Ask us new bank connectors and we will deliver based on a mutually agreed planning.

How could we start using BankingSDK?

Using BankingSDK is a few steps process. You have to:

  • first, create an account in the Developer Portal: https://developer.bankingsdk.com
  • second, you read, yes : – read – the documentation here: https://docs.exthand.com
  • third, you contact us and we will proceed to a first technical onboarding with your tech team. This is the fastest way to get on tracks.

Which are the Clouds providers currently supported?

BankingSDK is released as Docker container. Docker (c) is a well-known technology to handle containers in Cloud systems. We did test the Docker container compatibility with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and IBM Financial Services Cloud.

How long does it take to integrate BankingSDK?

If you check the sample code provided on GitHub, you can have something working with our sandbox in a few hours.

A full implementation, using your own BankingSDK Docker instance, storing data in your servers, using real certificates, handling real users: 5 days.

No more. And we do provide support during the integration process.

How does BankingSDK handle client certificates?

Your eIDAS certificates (in case you are a regulated TPP) or your bank certificates are stored in your Cloud system. We never manage, store or collect your certificates or your customers certificates.

Your certificates, your rules! 😉

I want to know more.

Just send us an email to sales at exthand.com