FAPI is a fully open standard designed for banks and fintechs in Europe and around the world to build Open Banking standards for secure exchange of consumer financial information. APIs are essential in making this a reality.

Synonymous with innovation and a commitment to open standards, ForgeRock is active in the certifications, regulations and standards that drive industries around the world, and the company has demonstrated consistent leadership in Open Banking. For two years, ForgeRock has worked with the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE), originally in delivering a reference implementation for the UK big banks (the CMA 9) to provide a Model Bank with APIs built to specification. Most recently, ForgeRock delivered a Sandbox-as-a-Service to enable agile development teams to achieve compliance with Open Banking and the Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2).

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) promotes, protects and nurtures the OpenID community and technologies, and supported the working group responsible for delivering the FAPI certification. The standard enables banks and fintechs to test and certify their implementations, which should accelerate development and testing, reduce support issues, and reduce costs. FAPI aims to provide specific implementation guidelines for online financial services to adopt, and can be applied in any market that requires higher levels of security.

Don Thibeau, executive director of OpenID Foundation, said, “We congratulate ForgeRock on becoming the first to demonstrate full conformance with the FAPI standard. In working with the OBIE and industry leaders like ForgeRock, the OpenID Foundation is proud to build upon the Financial-grade API with an advanced approach that enables stronger security, openness, flexibility, easy-to-implement and delivers real customer value. We hit all of those themes with this new Open Banking standard.”

Accelerating Compliance with the ForgeRock Sandbox-as-a-Service
The primary goal of PSD2 and Open Banking is to encourage greater innovation and competition within financial services. To facilitate this, ForgeRock delivered a Sandbox that is fully compliant, and meets the agreed standard for testing the functionality of Account Information Service Providers (AISPs) and Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs). The cloud-based solution can be deployed rapidly, and is already in production for several European banks that provide apps and services to more than 35 million consumers.

More information on the ForgeRock Sandbox-as-a-Service is available here.

Nick Caley, Vice President Financial Services & Regulatory at ForgeRock, said, “ForgeRock is pleased to lead this initial wave of innovation, by demonstrating full conformance with FAPI. Everyone understands APIs will completely change the financial services landscape and other markets by driving new competition, collaboration and innovation. In support of the standard, along with our Sandbox for Open Banking, we continue to provide financial institutions with compliance-ready solutions that can prevent significant technical headaches, and save time and money, now and in the future.