This week, CCUA's Government Relations Team hosted a policy webinar, in collaboration with CGI, entitled Open Banking Infrastructure, which focused on providing members with a deeper understanding of the infrastructure and service planning of open banking to better prepare themselves for the anticipated release of Canada's official Open Banking Framework.
The webinar, which is the 4th episode in the open banking webinar series, was very insightful and provided members with valuable insights on what they could expect from the national framework from an infrastructure perspective and highlighted the need for organizational alignment to ensure its successful integration across the industry. Below are the main highlights from the Open Banking Infrastructure Webinar:
Five Key Takeaways from Open Banking Infrastructure Webinar
What is an API?
- APIs are pieces of code that make it possible to share data and information between applications, systems, data servers, and devices
- Essentially, APIs make it possible for system entities to talk to each other
How an API works in an Open Banking context
- The client sends the request and “consumes” the API
- The API makes a call to the server, passed on the request, after receiving the original request
- The server sends the response back to the API with the requested information
- Finally, the API transfers the data to the client
Consent management is critical infrastructure to an Open Banking API
- Participants party to consent: end user (aka member), data recipient, and data provider
- The FDX consent lifecycle allows the user to grant, manage, and revoke their consent
The necessary infrastructure for credit union participation in open banking
- Credit unions will need the following infrastructure:
- Secure API gateway & API management
- Consent management
- Identify federation, authentication & access management (ID pooling)
- Data management and governance
- Standardized APIs (to be determined by the Canadian government)
- Orchestration microservices
- Connectivity to channels, external providers/partners, enterprise back-ends
Credit unions don’t need to wait to start building their API until the standard is chosen
- The infrastructure behind developing an API can start to be built now
- Designing the infrastructure can be done now: do I put it in the cloud? Do I store it with a third-party?
- From a business side, a credit union can start work on that now. Questions like, what services do I want to offer my members, and as a result, what data do I need to fulfill those services? What data do we need to get from external services?
In case you missed the session, a recording of the webinar is available: Open Banking Infrastructure
The presentation slides for this webinar are also available here