Open Banking API

Open Banking is the model that allows secure, standardised access to your customers' bank account data and, where applicable, the ability to initiate payments without manually downloaded statements, CSV files or separate integrations with every single institution. It rests on three pillars:

• the European PSD2 regulation, which requires banks to expose their services through APIs;
• the end user's explicit consent, always revocable and limited in both scope and duration;
• and strong customer authentication (SCA), which ensures every access is authorised by the account holder directly with their own bank.

For those integrating it, the benefit is tangible: a single interface for hundreds of institutions, account and transaction data that is up to date and already normalised, and no banking credentials passing through your systems.

A-Cube is an official Salt Edge partner Salt Edge being the provider of the bank connectivity service our platform is built on.

The following pages describe the technical integration in detail.

Account information and payments

PSD2 defines two distinct services, and Open Banking API covers both:

• AIS (Account Information Service) is the read side: once the end user has given consent, it retrieves the list of their accounts and the transactions on them, so you can reconcile and monitor without statements, CSV files or banking credentials passing through your systems.
• PIS (Payment Initiation Service) is the write side: it starts a payment on one of those accounts — either requesting one from a debtor or sending one out — with the account holder authorising each single operation directly with their own bank.

Account information is the baseline of the service. Payment initiation is an additional product, which has to be enabled for your integration: consulting transactions does not by itself allow you to move money.

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Environments

• sandbox is the environment where you can test the entire platform without paying at any time; In this environment you can find both simulated environments and real connections to financial institutions. To choose a fake connection you can specify XF as country code in the country field of the payload of the ConnectRequest API. In this environment there is a maximum number of accounts you can connect and limits to the payments. When you cross those limits you will get a 402 Payment required http error. The base URL is https://ob-sandbox.api.acubeapi.com
• production is the environment where every connection and every payment is real: the platform communicates with the production channels of the Financial Institutions, so each operation affects the real accounts of the End User. The simulated connections available in sandbox (the XF country code) cannot be used here, and the sandbox limits on the number of connected accounts and on payments do not apply. Billable operations, such as creating a Business Registry or enabling it for data reading, are charged in this environment. The base URL is https://ob.api.acubeapi.com

Authentication

You can find all the information about the authentication here.

Technical documentation

Open Banking API provides a way to connect to financial institutions using PSD2 channels. With this API set it is possible to query financial accounts and to make payments initiation.

Actors involved in this process are:

• The End User, i.e. the owner of financial accounts.
• The Software Integrator, i.e. the OpenBanking API consumer.
• A-Cube, i.e. the OpenBanking API provider
• The Financial Institution (sometimes we'll indicate it with the generic term Bank) that hosts the accounts of the End User

You can read a step by step tutorial on how to connect and retrieve transactions here.

You can learn how to require a payment whith this tutorial.

If you want to send a payment read this tutorial.