The EU’s Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) is intended to encourage innovation and competition in banking services, including by requiring banks to enable open banking services.

In other words, banks have to make it possible for third party providers, subject to the customer giving consent, to access account information and to carry out transactions through what are known as APIs.

This became a legal requirement in Norway with effect from 2019, but so far only very few banking customers have seen any major changes in their customer experience.

TietoEVRY has developed a service that can read from and write to numerous different open APIs, and this has been built directly into its online bank. This means that with a single log-in at just one bank, a customer can view all his or her bank accounts together in the same place.

“This is only the start of the open banking wave, which will lead to major simplifications for customers,“ says Vadims Lamovs, Lead Technical Product Manager in Payments at TietoEVRY, “Currently for customers who have accounts with multiple banks, keeping track of them can be both difficult and time-consuming, particularly if they have accounts that they do not use very often.”

“Empowering customers with a full financial overview can solve many issues,” explains Anders Flatås, Product Manager in Digital Banking Services at TietoEVRY, “If they only need to interact with one online bank, this will provide a better customer experience and make it easier for them to keep control of their finances.”

So far this year TietoEVRY has entered into agreements with 17 Norwegian banks to introduce the new service.

Norwegian and European banks are currently working on adapting to the PSD2 requirements, and more banks are expected to follow suit in the near future.