Three Years On, Open Banking Broadens For Business Banking

Last week, the U.K. marked its third anniversary of adopting its open banking framework, making it the leading market to drive the concept of unlocking customers’ bank account data for integration with third-party solution providers.

Over the last three years, the open banking model has continued to proliferate in markets around the world — even in jurisdictions, like the U.S., where there is no open banking regulatory mandate. And while the concept initially set its sights on elevating the consumer banking experience, the data integration drive continues to expand into new use cases, including business banking, that open up opportunity through bank-FinTech collaboration and data integration.

In this week’s look at the latest in bank-FinTech collaboration, PYMNTS explores the newest initiatives around open banking to support corporate end-users, including the latest application programming interface (API)-driven initiative from Xero in South Africa.

Citi Drives ISO 20022 Adoption With Volante

Citi is accelerating its migration to the ISO 20022 payments messaging standard and has tapped a third-party FinTech to aid in the process. The financial institution (FI) revealed last week that it is working with Volante Technologies to accelerate its ISO 20022 adoption, leaving Citi to become Volante’s first banking customer to take a unified approach to its global migration to the messaging standard. Citi is using Volante’s VolPay for ISO 20022 Migration technology to build out its core ISO 20022 capability, which will allow the bank to send and receive messages that use the standard. Doing so, the bank noted, will streamline and enhance a range of payment-related workflows, including sanctions screening, anti-money laundering (AML) checks, reporting and reconciliation.

HashCash Brings Blockchain Tech To Unnamed Bank

Although blockchain technology company HashCash Consultants did not name the FI, the company revealed it is collaborating with a bank in the U.S. to bring its blockchain-powered corporate trade financing technology into the entity. The partnership, which will see the bank adopting its B2B payments platform to finance trade of its corporate customers. In addition to facilitating corporate payments, the platform enables seamless integration, real-time reconciliation and document sharing, and smart contract automation. In a statement, HashCash CEO Raj Chowdhury said, “the USA-based bank can protect their data through encryption and blockchain immutability” and, with HashCash’s technology, can enhance its working capital and account balance operations.

Temenos Targets Banks With Digital Transformation Tools

Banking software firm Temenos is rolling out a new product offering for FIs to help accelerate their own digitization efforts. According to an announcement, Temenos has debuted its Temenos Enterprise Pricing solution, a tool that enables banks to “design, manage and price innovative products, services and product bundles” for FIs that are integrating a range of third-party solution providers. With a focus on larger FIs with legacy infrastructure, Temenos said that its technology helps banks to accelerate modernization roadmaps and create personalized, technology-focused products across customer bases and geographies.

Xero Drives Open Banking In South Africa With Nedbank

In what the companies described is a first for South Africa’s banking sector, small business accounting platform Xero is working with Nedbank to unlock financial data of joint small business customers. Xero is deploying an API bank feed that will directly connect bank account data into the Xero accounting platform to automate and accelerate financial data input and analysis. Xero and Nedbank said their data connectivity agreement will go live in the coming weeks and help to provide SMBs with a holistic, real-time view of cash flow and financial positions. In a statement, Xero South Africa country manager Colin Timmis said, “using bank feeds as a consequence of frameworks like ‘open banking’ has become more prevalent, providing secure, customer consent-driven journeys which ultimately put ownership of data back into the customer’s hands.”