Berlin Group is offering support to new European payment schemes

The European market is facing a multitude of payment methods that all share comparable functionality, but with different customer interfaces, creating implementation challenges (and related costs), especially at bank IT systems. Today the Berlin Group announced in public that its PSD2 Open Banking standards already support new Open Finance schemes (e.g. EPC SPAA and giroAPI), and that additional leverage and support is offered to new payment schemes currently being defined, of which some aim to contribute to European sovereignty and autonomy (e.g. EUDI Wallet, Digital Euro).

This makes integration of the new European payment schemes easy for banks and their users (a.o. corporates, SMEs, Fintechs, Third Party Providers). Re-use of the existing PSD2 investments and infrastructures will foster a rapid market adoption of the new European schemes.

As a solid foundation to the industry and with ~80 % European market coverage in implemented PSD2 Open Banking standards, Berlin Group is again leading the way on modern and interoperable API-centric standards for Open Finance and the new European payment schemes. This is considered a substantial contribution to achieving full European sovereignty and autonomy in payments.

„The Berlin Group standards are designed to be future-proof, ensuring that they can adapt to the changing needs of the industry. We believe that this announcement will be a game-changer for the open finance ecosystem, providing a clear path for banks and other financial institutions to adopt open finance standards with confidence.„, said Dr. Andreas Martin, Member of the Board of Managing Directors from the National Association of German Cooperative Banks and member of the Berlin Group.

With the rise of Open Finance, the Berlin Group has continued to innovate and evolve its standards to meet the changing needs of the industry. A lot of new Open Finance services have already been delivered since the Open Finance standardisation started two years ago. Together with all additional services that will be delivered this year, the market of banks, fintechs, regulated third party providers, payment processors, and corporates is enabled to implement compelling, interoperable and innovative value-added services for end-users in among others e-commerce, securities business, trade finance, wealth management and digital contracting.

More industries are on the radar for being opened up. This will offer banking customers new innovative products and services via safe and secure (authenticated and authorised) access to their bank accounts and financial data.

At the Open Finance Conference 2023, the Berlin Group showcased how its standards are already fully covering the requirements of schemes and corporate bank customers. This means that banks and other financial Berlin Group API Framework is offering support to all prevailing API-based Payment Schemes and Corporate Bank Customer Use Cases and Services institutions can confidently adopt the Berlin Group standards, knowing that they will be able to meet the needs of their customers both now and in the future.

The Berlin Group believes that open and harmonised standards for processes, data and infrastructures are the necessary building blocks of an open, interoperable market. True interoperability is an essential component of competitive services that will contribute to further progress towards the Single Market and benefit the payments industry as well as consumers and businesses alike.

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The Berlin Group is a pan-European payments interoperability standards and harmonisation initiative with the primary objective of defining open and common standards in the interbank domain. The Berlin Group first met in Berlin in October 2004. Participants include banks, banking associations, payment associations, national and international payment schemes, interbank processors working in SEPA, and central banks.