Founding fathers of UK’s open banking standards launch Ozone Open Finance Hub to support challenger banks and EMIs

 

  • Ozone launches Open Finance Hub to help simplify the delivery of high-performing APIs
  • With regulators increasing their focus on compliance, pressure on financial institutions of all sizes to have compliant open APIs is growing

Ozone, developer of the leading standards-based software for open banking, has launched a specialist platform to help financial institutions (FIs), challenger banks, neo banks and e-money institutions (EMIs) handle the growing complexity of open banking and open finance.

Ozone’s API software already helps financial institutions deliver open APIs that are fully compliant with the OpenID Foundation’s FAPI and CIBA profiles and offers full support for major global standards, including UK Open Banking, Berlin Group and FDX, as well as a growing number of emerging open banking standards around the world, such as in Brazil, Mexico, Bahrain and many others.

The Ozone Open Finance Hub is a fully managed platform, based on the Ozone API software and hosted in the cloud, which provides all the tools needed to manage Third Party Providers (TPPs) and handle fine-grained consent, meeting the highest possible security standards, offering a great customer experience and enabling the delivery of the widest possible range of regulatory and commercial use cases.

The Hub is also designed to deliver a great developer experience through a fully transactional sandbox and smart testing tools, enabling FIs and EMIs to develop new applications quickly and reduce the ongoing cost of ownership.

Chris Michael, CEO of Ozone, said: “We are thrilled to be able to offer such a critical industry resource to challenger banks, neo banks, small to medium-sized FIs and EMIs at a time when the FCA and EBA have made clear their expectations. Delivering open banking APIs is a complex and specialist area, and the Ozone team have leveraged their deep expertise to develop a platform that takes away that complexity.”

Some financial institutions previously saw APIs as a compliance headache and expressed concern that there wouldn’t be sufficient numbers of third parties wanting to connect. Ozone expects this dynamic to change as regulators start to take a closer look at PSD2 compliance across the wider industry.

With the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) signaling their intent to mandate APIs for open banking, and with both the FCA and the European Banking Authority (EBA) looking to extend the framework to open finance, it is expected that financial institutions of all sizes will soon need to have a fully standards-compliant open API.

Chris said: “Open APIs are an important strategic channel to market for financial institutions of all sizes. They provide a lower-cost route to serve more customers in more flexible ways via the platforms they want to use. And we are here to serve and resource the open banking community.”

Sarah Holt, Head of Commercial Partnerships, Monese, said: “At Monese, our mission is to provide access to fair, flexible financial services and support. Partnering with a specialist like Ozone is accelerating our open banking programme. This unlocks many new possibilities to provide a seamless customer experience and helps us deliver on our mission.’’

Ozone’s pioneering standards-based API software and the Ozone Open Finance Hub have been developed by the founding fathers of the UK open banking standard – the team that led the development of and wrote this standard for the UK’s Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE). Ozone also provides the official sandbox for OBIE and helps banks and FIs of all sizes around the world deliver high-performing, standards-based open APIs, enabling them to meet both regulatory and commercial requirements.

Deane Barton, VP of Payments at Tide, said: “It helps having the people who literally wrote the book on open banking on your side. Ozone’s rich solution and team have been invaluable in our journey to PSD2 compliance, giving us a significant advantage in the open banking space.”

 

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