Is SPAA the Missing Piece for Successful Open Banking?

In parallel with a review of PSD2, the EPC (European Payments Council) started working on a scheme based on their lessons learned from PSD2 and open banking. They did so at the request of the Euro Retail Payments Board, a multi-stakeholder forum presided by the European Central Bank.

That scheme is called the Sepa Payment Account Access (SPAA) scheme.

We invited the Co-Chair of the SPAA Multi-Stakeholder Group, Gijs Boudewijn (also GM of the Dutch Payments Association). He was so kind to ask David Birch, author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services.

Gijs: “The SPAA stems from the discomfort and unhappiness of both sides of the market, banks as well as TPPs, with the results of open banking, as defined in PSD2, lacking, on the one hand, the functionality that the TPPs would like to have, and lacking the incentive for the banks to create good API’s and good functionality.”

SPAA is different

Both sides of the market sat together, and with PSD2 as a baseline, they decided to build a 4-corner model, agnostic of what is being exchanged. There is the asset holder, the bank with bank accounts (2 corners) and the asset broker, TPPs with asset users (merchants) (2 more corners).