Open Banking explained

John_G_Jones

Gentoo365 wrote: »

Who will pay compensation if customer (A) is scammed by scammer (B) into using a the services of a genuine (Open Banking) app offered by company (C) to move money from their bank (D) to another bank (E)?

If the banks have to act on instructions given via the open banking API, does that not increase the risk of fraud?

..or can banks refuse to accept instructions via this method.

No-one, I’d hope, no bank should ever be on the hook if they accept a request from a customer and act on it.

Chappers27

Open banking is much safer than previous methods.

Previously, you'd give your app provider (whoever was asking for access) your login credentials. This effectively gives them full access to your account, via screen scraping. They keep your account logged in, and built bots to extract the data they need. It is now banned under PSD2 for financial services.

Open Banking has been forced on banks and providers. It is highly regulated. Only regulated companies can provide this service. It is based on READ-ONLY data. The customer is in control of what data is shared and can turn it off at any time. Since it is READ-ONLY, and based on APIs, it is akin to someone having a look at your bank statement and writing down the transactions.

It is still very early stage and the problem at the moment is the categorisation. There arent very good categorisations at the moment because the existing payment systems dont do it properly. For example, you could pay for petrol at Sainsbury's and your statement will say 'Sainsburys', without telling you it was petrol you paid for.

Incidentially, screen scraping is used by apps like Money Dashboard and is definitely used by WonderBill and Onedox. It is only a matter of time before screen scraping is banned in bills / utilities as well.

In summary, read only open banking is 99% safer than existing methods.

Paul Chapman (disclaimer: I manage AdminBox, a household bills dashboard)

swindiff

Accessing all my accounts in one app does have appeal, but I was not prepared to give my banking details to a 3rd party app. However, I now notice that my Halifax banking app will allow me to access many of my other accounts, Lloyds, Santander, Natwest, etc. I feel more comfortable about using an existing banking app to do this than some other 3rd party app. What are peoples thoughts on this?

MoneySavingTart

I'd certainly feel more comfortable about using one of my existing providers to collate information from the others until such time as they started using the information to sell me further products or worse still, suggest I move funds to them!

Every month I collect account information from bank accounts, ISAs, Share portfolios and P2P providers for both my wife and I and put into a spreadsheet to estimate net worth. I can't imagine the Halifax (or others) being able to do that lot reliably.

MST

jamesd

swindiff wrote: »

I feel more comfortable about using an existing banking app to do this than some other 3rd party app. What are peoples thoughts on this?

Find out whether Halifax will use the information about your other accounts and transactions for anything other than just showing them to you.

In general, expect that providers will abuse your trust by saying it's to show you, then also use any information they can get for marketing, credit scoring, reselling to other firms for marketing and anything else that enters their thoughts. Unless you find completely unambiguous guarantees saying they don't.

potofteatohavein

Has anyone has problems with setting up open banking from a personal current account to a joint current account across providers? - both providers are signed up to Open Banking and I have Internet and Mobile banking with both parties. Both are major high street players.

My personal account with provider X can see no reason why I get the error message from provider Y : 'our records show that you have not completed onboarding. Please log into your internet bank to complete onboarding and try again'

My joint account with provider Y : does not understand the error message because it redirects me back to provider X.

Having phoned both providers, neither audit trails go far enough to see on which side the error lies and because of GDPR neither side are able to solve this mystery.

It isn't obvious from the Open Banking.org website whether you can use open banking with a joint account. Any thoughts?

colin206

I use Banktivity to balance my accounts on my MAC. I was surprised that I got a warning message.
Important information for our United Kingdom customers

We have recently learned from our Direct Access backend provider that as of September 14th, 2019, IGG Software will be unable to support Direct Access for the nine UK banks listed below.

This interruption in service is a result of the new Open Banking regulations set forth by the Finance Conduct Authority. We are investigating what it will take to restore connectivity in the coming months. We are working with our data aggregator to understand and meet these new requirements, but this outcome is not guaranteed. If there are any updates, we will post an in-app message and put a notification on our website.

Please note that other UK banks could be affected. As best we can, we will maintain a list on our support site. Banktivity’s other services and functionality will remain unchanged. At this point in time we believe the following banks will be affected:

First Trust Bank in Northern Ireland
Bank of Ireland (UK)
Barclays Bank
HSBC Group
Lloyds Banking Group
Nationwide Building Society
Danske Bank
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group
Santander UK

eskbanker

colin206 wrote: »

I use Banktivity to balance my accounts on my MAC. I was surprised that I got a warning message.
Important information for our United Kingdom customers

We have recently learned from our Direct Access backend provider that as of September 14th, 2019, IGG Software will be unable to support Direct Access for the nine UK banks listed below.

This interruption in service is a result of the new Open Banking regulations set forth by the Finance Conduct Authority. We are investigating what it will take to restore connectivity in the coming months. We are working with our data aggregator to understand and meet these new requirements, but this outcome is not guaranteed. If there are any updates, we will post an in-app message and put a notification on our website.

Please note that other UK banks could be affected. As best we can, we will maintain a list on our support site. Banktivity’s other services and functionality will remain unchanged. At this point in time we believe the following banks will be affected:

First Trust Bank in Northern Ireland
Bank of Ireland (UK)
Barclays Bank
HSBC Group
Lloyds Banking Group
Nationwide Building Society
Danske Bank
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group
Santander UK

It's the same for any aggregation software using the old-style screen-scraping method of accessing accounts - the introduction of two-factor authentication for all UK bank accounts from that date means that access to online banking will necessitate authentication via separate SMS messages or apps, so any third party system that has previously relied on logging in solely using username and password will no longer work.

One of the main principles of Open Banking was to open up properly-integrated access via software APIs, so it was always known since January 2018 that anything still using screen-scraping would eventually cease to be functional - this is covered at post #38 of this thread among other places....

Edit: it's also explained in the MSE "Open Banking explained" article that this thread is about: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/open-banking/#access