Continuing its commitment to innovation and industry leadership, ForgeRock has delivered a reference bank implementation and directory, providing a technical sandbox for organizations looking to build and test Open Banking/PSD2 APIs. The lightweight and incredibly fast test platform has been acknowledged and celebrated by the team at UK Open Banking, the Implementation Entity set up by the UK Government's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in 2016, to deliver Open Banking.

The ForgeRock development team has created an Open Banking Technical Solution Guide on the directory.

Open Banking regulations, which began coming online in the UK earlier this year, force banks to make account and payment data available through secure application programming interfaces (APIs) to give consumers greater freedom and control in how they interact with their financial services providers, and enable them to use exciting new services offered by third parties. Last year ForgeRock worked with the Open Banking team to deliver a reference implementation for the big banks, known as the CMA 9, providing a Model Bank with APIs built to specification. While the Open Banking ecosystem is effective, it can be time-consuming for agile development teams building and testing new propositions only after registering with a central directory. Applying to the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) can take several weeks before starting to test and validate APIs and can pose a significant barrier to entry for many organizations.

The ForgeRock Open Banking Directory solves the aforementioned scenario. It's a fully compliant directory sandbox with the same functionality as the central directory, but it is immediately accessible for development teams to gain instant access to the APIs in parallel with the formal FCA registration process.
Trust and Consent Drive The Next Phase of the API Economy

Open APIs are at the heart of the data sharing economy, with regulations now forcing banks to open account and payment data to third parties. As more data is being exposed, trust and consent are essential requirements for any open banking ecosystem architecture, including:
• Onboarding: Banks need a way to onboard and verify the third parties that are to be trusted with data.
• Consent: Banks need a way to confirm that customers consent to data being shared, so authentication and authorization are required.
• Access: Third parties need a way to actually access data, and banks need a way to protect that data and enforce that it is only accessed with user consent by registered entities.

Nick Caley, Vice President Financial Services & Regulatory, said, "What started in the UK with Open Banking is rapidly expanding geographically to the EU, Australia and beyond, across other vertical sectors including Utilities and Telecommunications. Open APIs represent an enormous opportunity for organizations to comply and compete, and ForgeRock remains uniquely positioned to provide leadership. Extending the Model Bank we provide with a directory to enable streamlined access for third party users to test functionality is a catalyst for more innovation. We're pleased to expand our work with Open Banking, demonstrating the power of our technology to advance the industry."