Preparing for the move to ‘open banking’, as embodied in the second Payment Services Directive, is a key challenge for the French banking industry in 2018, according to the country’s digital minister, Mounir Mahjoubi. Nevertheless, he believes that it will also help to progress the digital transformation of incumbent institutions and encourage a thriving fintech industry.
The European directive, which comes into force in September 2019, aims to increase competition by giving new payment players easier access to customer financial data through, for example, application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as enhance security and consumer protection.
