Unveiled in early spring, the API platform is Nordea's effort to capitalise on the ground-shaking changes to the European payments landscape envisaged under the forthcoming revisions to the Payment Services Directive (PSD2). Under the rules, banks will be obliged to provide licensed third parties with secure access to customers’ accounts.

During the autumn, Nordea picked through the hundreds of developers to have expressed an interest in the programme and began further testing in a sandbox environment with a limited number of participants.

The bank says it is now ready to connect the APIs to its production system and open up access to account information from its Finnish customer database.

“The new PSD2 regulation will fundamentally change banking. It is not a fad. Banking will be different as from 2018, when banks have to open up to third parties to offer services to account holders,” says Erik Zingmark, co-head of transaction banking in Nordea. “We view PSD2 as an opportunity, which is why we have made a significant effort in the building of 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 next stage will see third party applications use an Account Information Service API to retrieve and initiate payments through a Payment Initiation Service API. The end users will be able to authenticate themselves, giving consent to the third-party provider to access their accounts.

“Together with fintechs and other external developers we aim to create new products and services for our customers at a faster pace than we could do by ourselves - all while keeping the customers firmly in control of what data they wish to expose and which products they wish to use.” says Claus Richter, head of cash management solutions at Nordea. “That hard work has paid off, and we are proud to be the first Nordic bank to offer our pilots access to real customer data.”