BNP Paribas has announced that it shared its API interface that allows so-called third party access to its IT production environment. The company’s representatives claim that BNP Paribas is the first bank in Poland to manage that. My sources tell me that Alior and Santander might follow in BNP Paribas’s footsteps as soon as next week.

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The obligation for banks to share their API is a consequence of the introduction of the PSD II directive. If a bank wants to avoid the so-called fall-back mechanism, it should have shared a test API environment no later than March 14th 2019. Then it should implement a production API no later than June 14th. The fall-back option, generally speaking, will allow authorised parties to gain access to bank accounts via their customers’ interfaces. However, banks don’t want to allow this for security reasons, among others.

Access to bank customers’ accounts via the API will be granted to so-called third party providers (TTPs). This can include fintech companies that offer various payment services or other services that require a customer’s financial transaction history. In order to become a TTP, a fintech company has to be entered in the appropriate registry by the regulator - the Financial Supervision Authority in the case of Poland. From what I know, the Financial Supervision Authority hasn’t entered any companies in it yet. However, the Polish fintech company Kontomatik acquired the necessary entry in Lithuania.

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BNP Paribas proudly announced that about a dozen parties gained access to its testing environment through its API. — Now all those companies and institutions have been invited to apply for access to the production environment via the API — said Jarosław Mastalerz, BNP Paribas’s omnichannel process development department manager.