Oracle Financial Services is today making a prebuilt repository of more than 1,500 REST APIs available to its customers, the company said.
The release comes as PSD2/Open Banking forces banks to rethink their architecture, amid a move towards a banking marketplace powered by third-party access to customer data.
The Oracle suite spans APIs across payments, retail and corporate banking – including specialized functions like multiproduct originations, retail customer financial insights, bulk payments, and trade finance, the company said in a statement.
“The early mover advantage is critical for success for banks in the open banking era,” said Chet Kamat, Senior Vice President, Oracle Financial Services. “Oracle Banking APIs is designed to bring acceleration, and help banks gain competitive advantage.”
The solution is capable of working with any core banking or online banking solution, identity management and API gateway solution, Oracle added.
Meet the Conductor of the Open Banking Orchestra
The release comes after Hans Tessellaar, the Executive Director of The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), told Computer Business Review that Open Banking remained very much a work in progress.
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As he put it: “One of the biggest problems is simply that the regulator was not clear enough with their recommendations. Even in recent months they have been struggling to collect good examples of PSD2-compliant APIs.”
Awaiting the Open Banking “Killer App”
Research and Markets, meanwhile, in a report this week, sounded a subdued note on uptake.
“Consumer expectations for benefits of open banking are modest, and open banking-enabled end-user products commonly noted as in-market in the EU and the UK today indicate a predominance of personal financial management applications, which are typically without direct revenues to banks” the research house said.
Neither European nor US banks and providers have created a “killer app” that generates significant end-user benefits or institutional revenues, the report’s authors noted.
Oracle Financial Services meanwhile hopes that by teaming up with the company’s Cloud Startup Accelerator & Scaleup Ecosystem to host its first Fintech-focussed Hackathon, this may well change in the near future.
Startups Signzy, Active AI, Teknospire, Zwift Pay, KapitalWise, Bnesis, Qalize, Happay, Statanalytics, Lifesaver, Numberz, Raisin and Unscrambl were all selected to participate in the even this month, Oracle said, and provided a API Sandbox of Oracle Banking APIs to develop use cases.
As for the use cases? A case of watch this space…
