Switzerland’s leading telecommunications company and one of the country’s leading IT companies is standardising on the CA Technologies API Management portfolio to create a simple, secure interface that connects financial institutions with third-parties, including fintech start-up companies. The Swisscom Open Banking Hub enables unprecedented opportunities for collaboration between banks and third-parties, inspiring the rapid, secure development of innovative new services and customer experiences that drive business growth.

“Traditional banks and new, nimble Fintechs are no longer working against each other, but rather in tandem to create exciting and compelling new financial solutions,” says André Durrer, Head of Digital Business Platforms at Swisscom. “The Swisscom Open Banking Hub provides banks, Fintechs and other third-party providers with a secure and agile platform upon which they can grow business. CA Technologies is the lynchpin of this modern and dynamic Hub, enabling secure API-based connection between providers and users of services. Their proven, flexible solution opens the door to digital data communication in existing and future financial ecosystems.”

Open Banking Hub Drives Innovation

Open banking has arisen from new legislation that gives financial providers secure access to customer information via APIs (application programming interfaces), which import the data they hold into third-party applications and services. It represents a significant shift in the way both consumers and businesses bank, enabling the development of a wider range of personalised services and increased competition in the market.

With the Swisscom Open Banking Hub, financial institutions and third-parties do not need to worry about infrastructure issues and challenges such as security, performance, availability and transparency. Everything in the Hub is available as a service, ensuring that Hub users maintain the focus on developing future services, helping them remain competitive and compliant.

The Hub operates on two levels: an “API Playground as a Service” provides financial services providers with a simple, no-obligation opportunity to test new third-party applications that are already connected to the Open Banking Hub. Secondly, it enables the productive use of the third-party solutions within Swisscom’s secure IT infrastructure—upon which it already operates the core banking systems of approximately 80 financial services providers. This is a major leap forward for third parties, especially Fintechs, since it helps satisfy the compliance and security requirements of legislation such as the Personal Services Directive 2 (PSD2).

The concept of the Hub is not limited to the financial services sector. The comprehensive nature of the solution framework, its ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and scalability can equally be applied to other industry sectors. With this in mind, Swisscom and CA Technologies plan to extend the initiative to start-ups in other sectors, such as MedTechs, InsureTechs, GovTechs, and RenTechs.

CA API Gateway Delivers Security Without Sacrificing User Experience

The CA API Gateway enables Swisscom to selectively open data and applications through the Hub to third-party developers—driving innovation, customer satisfaction and increased efficiency. Security is managed centrally, traffic can be prioritized to help ensure APIs remain available and responsive, and a variety of deployment models ensure support for a wide range of platforms, including Docker, AWS and Azure. This full lifecycle API management is also a critical requirement for open banking. According to Gartner, “open banking brings a number of key requirements for full life cycle API management vendors.” Their 2018 Critical Capabilities for Full Life Cycle API Management* also ranks CA Technologies the highest out of 22 API management vendors for the open banking use case for its CA API Management portfolio.

“The development of the Open Banking Hub represents a high-water mark in an eight-year relationship of digital transformation between Swisscom and CA Technologies,” says Rahim Bhatia, SVP and general manager, Developer Products at CA Technologies. “We’re pleased to build on our joint success, and enable Swisscom by providing the secure, scalable and performant API platform that will support and accelerate the growth of this innovative financial ecosystem as the Hub expands.”

“We are immensely proud of this exciting partnership with Swisscom,” says Rui Martins, Country Manager Switzerland, CA Technologies. “It unites two powerful forces in technology and telecommunications: CA Technologies’ world-class API Management technology, coupled with Swisscom’s unrivalled experience and expertise, will prove to be a formidable and unbeatable force in Open Banking. As partners, we share the belief that innovation is key to success and it’s this shared vision that will propel the Open Banking Hub to its next phase of growth.”

Other key projects CA Technologies has been involved with include supporting Swisscom with service reporting; accelerating the development and launch of Swisscom’s TV solution portfolio; standardizing secure application interfaces internally; servicing the bank’s internal mainframe reporting; optimising the testing of the bank’s API factory; and additional reporting on the bank’s network of large enterprise customers.