Nordea has extended its open banking platform to Sweden to enable developers to build applications to provide better financial solutions for Swedish and also Finnish customers.
Image: Nordea's open banking platform goes live in Sweden. Photo: courtesy of Nordea.
The Nordic financial services group has made test data available to all third party developers at its Developer portal following the launch of the open banking platform in Sweden.
It said that third parties need to get a PSD2 license from the relevant national financial authority to get access to real customer data.
According to Nordea, the Account Information Service (AIS) API can now be used by developers in Sweden through which they can retrieve account information details and initiate payments via the Payment Initiation Service (PIS) API.
In turn, the Nordea customers, who are the end users, will be able to authenticate themselves, thereby enabling them to give permission to the third-party providers to access their accounts.
Nordea CEO Casper von Koskull said: “We’ve decided to embrace open banking – and not just for the sake of compliance with the latest PSD2 regulations. We see open banking as a huge opportunity to create better financial solutions.
“We know that co-creation with third parties will be essential to innovation and that’s why we’ve opened our APIs to everyone, even our competitors. We’re combining our extensive knowledge and resources with the agility of developers to drive innovation.”
Nordea said that its open banking team is working on extending the services to Norway and Denmark.
The Nordic bank’s open banking platform was rolled out at the end of last year after Finnish customer data was made accessible to third party developers.
Nordea claims that it is among the first European banks to see the potential opportunities provided by Payment Services Directive (PSD2) regulations which require banks to open up to third parties to deliver services to account holders.
The bank said that over 2,500 developers have registered to test its APIs ever since it had launched its open banking platform.
Nordea Transaction Banking head Erik Zingmark said: “By moving forward with Sweden, we are maintaining our position as a frontrunner in Open Banking and are the first bank to open up two countries in the Nordics on this scale.”
In another development, Nordea agreed to sell about 36% of its stake in Luminor Bank to a consortium led by private equity funds managed by Blackstone for €600m, in a move to simplify and focus its operations to the Nordic core markets.