Version 3.1 of the Open Banking (OB) Standard is here. As well as improvements based on feedback from the community, it brings new features including additional account types (like savings and credit cards) into scope, and further steps towards compliance with PSD2, an EU directive established to encourage safer and more innovative payment services. While most of PSD2’s requirements became law in January 2018, phased roll-out will continue into 2021.

We’ve done the leg-work

As part of our commitment to make open banking work, we only make a version available when we’re confident that the banks’ APIs are robust and performant enough to handle your needs and the needs of your customers. We’ve always got your back and have completed extensive testing with the banks’ latest APIs, to make transitioning to version 3.1 as smooth as possible for our customers - in fact we have made 28 million calls to V3 end points over the past month - a benefit of OpenWrks being one of the biggest consumers of open banking APIs. 

The great news is that OpenWrks customers don’t need to do anything to be able to use the new version.

If you use Flow to manage end user consent, keep calm and carry on, you will see new banks and payment accounts become available in the bank selection process. If you use our categorisation service, we’ve mapped this to the new payment accounts as well.

What does this mean for you as an OpenWrks customer?

You can now connect credit cards, savings accounts, and also business account types such as corporate accounts.

The volume of data OpenWrks processes every day means we can explore any upcoming changes, identify and build solutions to address these challenges so you don’t have to worry about them. 

What other changes can you expect?

We’ve seen increased Secure Customer Authentication (SCA) restrictions to help reduce fraud and enhance security, and banks are generally returning more data. This includes things like transaction IDs that persist with each data pull, better transaction descriptions, and the booking times (not just dates) of transactions.

As with any update to the OB Standard, it can be hard to anticipate every change. One of the challenges we solve for you  is keeping up with the varied and evolving APIs of the different banks and providers. Each has their own way of doing things and can make individual tweaks that the rest haven’t. As we onboard additional providers like TSB, Capital One, CYBG and many more, we’ll be taking the same pre-emptive approach by testing the consistency, robustness and performance of their APIs before exposing them to you and your customers.

How the OpenWrks Lab environment can help

Even with the thorough testing we have done for you, it can be reassuring to get a feel for something new yourself before diving in. We built the OpenWrks Lab for times just like this. You can try version 3.1 in our Lab environment right now, and check out the new features and changes before they go live.

When can you start using version 3.1?

We’ll be rolling out version 3.1 bank by bank from now so keep an eye out for new banks and account types becoming available over the coming weeks.

Tell us how we are doing

We built OpenWrks for you and your customers and always like to hear what we have got wrong and got right. We want to hear your feedback on what we can improve so please let us know by sending an email to support@openwrks.com.