Open banking is a financial services term originated from the concept of Open innovation that means no secrecy, no hold of a centralized authority over our data in this information age. Things should be transparent. Something along the lines of the blockchain philosophy.

Open banking is a shift from the closed to an open banking and financial model. It involves big financial institutions like corporate banks providing financial data of the customers, on their approval, via a public API to the third-party developers. Just like how social networks like Twitter and Facebook provide user data to the developers via their Restful APIs, authenticated & authorized by protocols like OAuth.

According to the Open Banking initiative, banks should ideally implement public APIs using the open-source software. This ideology is being adopted by several countries following the open banking models of EU and UK

Open banking enables the end-user to have control over his data. It’s an opportunity for him to make the most out of his money by providing his data to the third-party developers/Fintech startups to get better deals like loan availability at fewer rates, investment advice & assistance with other finance-related stuff.

A few other use cases of these third-party apps are a money manager app where the user could fetch his data from his several accounts in multiple banks and consolidate all the information in one place to strategize his investments better. Via the app interface, he could also check the availability of the functional ATMs of his banks near his location etc.

Apps and website enrolled in the Open banking initiative are to be regulated by a central authority adhering to strict rules on data security, data protection laws & other operation guidelines.

For a full list of all the real-world software architecture posts on the blog here you go.

System Architecture

So, here is how the system works. The flow is just like how we approve our data to be accessed by third-party apps like social games from Facebook or Twitter.

User installs the third-party app. The app needs user data for its service, it prompts the user to approve the data access via a login pop up for a respective bank.

The user enters his details, the bank authenticates the credentials, confirms the user consent via an SMS or an email and provides the data specified by the user to the third-party app via a protocol like OAuth.

OAuth is an open authorization protocol which enables users to grant websites access to their information from other websites without giving them the password.

Third-party apps consume the public Open REST APIs made available via banks to fetch the required information. Here are the links to the open banking standards that respective countries follow

United Kingdom, France, New Zealand, Australia, Nigeria

If you wish to read more about the specification this is a good read

Recommended Read: Best handpicked resources to build a solid foundation in software architecture & system design

Code

Speaking of code, there is an open-source open banking project on GitHub called the OpenBankProject with 200+ APIs, used by over 10K developers to implement the Open Banking initiative. The APIs are written in Python, Java, Scala & JavaScript.

Recommended Read: Master System Design For Your Interviews Or Your Web Startup

Best handpicked resources to build a solid foundation in software architecture & system design

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