Open Banking Increasing
In the past few months, we’ve seen banks continue to improve their Open Banking services by putting out rich API catalogs or focusing on giving developers a good experience. Also, HSBC (Hong Kong), ICICI Bank (India), KBC (Belgium), Nedbank (South Africa), Raiffeisen Bank (Austria), Spar Nord (Denmark), US Bank, and Wells Fargo are among the new banks that have joined Open Banking and made their first appearance in our Open Banking Monitor (OBM) (United States).
Many banks have kept adding to what they offer through Open Banking. New APIs and features have helped make the Developer Experience better. Using our Capability Model to look at the best banks in each category shows that there isn’t just one clear winner (see image).
To talk more about some important changes, we’ll start with the new ICICI Bank. First of all, ICICI Bank has quickly become known as a “Innovator in Functionality” because it has at least 250 APIs. Its impressive API Catalogue has even helped it become a top-3 performer. The Aadhaar infrastructure in India is used by ICICI Bank to identify and authorize customers. When combined with India’s sector-wide API strategy, which is part of the India stack, this could mean that more Indian banks will soon start to offer Open Banking services.
Second, the National Bank of Greece has made a big step forward and now has the best combination of a rich API Catalogue and Developer Usability. The National Bank of Greece has a wide range of tools for developers, including SDKs, Swagger files, and Postman files. It also lets developers manage and work on their projects in a virtual programming environment.
Last but not least, we want to talk about Bunq’s great updates, which have turned it from a “Innovator in Functionality” to a “Master in Openness.” The combination of two functions is a particularly interesting change. Bunq’s “Access to Own Account” feature lets users access their own account information through APIs and then share the resulting apps through a GitHub repository. This makes it possible for everyone in the community to help keep these apps updated and add new features. Overall, there are a lot of GitHub repositories and community projects, so almost anyone can make an Open Banking app that connects to their own account. This might be an interesting look at Open Banking’s potential and how it might grow. Bunq is the best example of its kind in the category of Community Development. It shows how to involve the community and get users and developers more involved.
