TLDR; PSD2 is the EU regulated set of laws meant to force banks to open up their APIs to new fintech parties in 2018. Force being the operative word here. Banking shouldn’t be about protecting the bank's business model, but rather about the customer's best interests.
bunq believes in innovation and transparency. That's why we opened up our API more than 6 months ago, and with great success. Proving that even without PSD2, innovation is still possible!
For those who would like to read about the Revised Payment Service Directive, please check out this excellent article from Evry
bunq was born from a faulty system. Over the last couple of decades, banks transformed from a place to safely store your money to greedy institutions. Whose primary business model was based on making more money with your money. The recent banking crisis taught us all about the results of that strategy.
bunq is a bank that never touches your money. It's yours, we simply help you use it wherever, whenever and with whomever you want. By switching the business model back to keeping your money safe and making it easy to use, we focus on the users first. Users that want freedom befitting of the 21st century. Freedom to make their own investment choices, freedom to budget and freedom to spend, save and manage their money whatever way they prefer.
Revised Payment Service Directive
PSD2 was created as a way to get banks to open up their systems, allowing new fintechs to start building solutions on top of it. This legislation was made to force openness, and if there is one thing that existing legacy banks don’t like, it’s to be forced into giving up their customer lock-in.
Imagine your company has made its money by cross-selling products and user behaviour data, and is now being forced to open give access to all users. Effectively allowing third-party providers to sell them the same service. This will surely impact your (very profitable) business model.
Because of all the lobbying and complicated rules and regulations across Europe, PSD2 has been delayed and delayed. Even if all the countries are putting PSD2 into effect straight away, technical implementation will still take years.
Transparency & Openness
Freedom at bunq means transparency and openness. That's why we provide our core banking services combined with a public API. An API that wasn't forced into existence by PSD2, but one that was created because we would want to use it ourselves too. An API that lets developers all around the world build awesome services on top of a rock-solid bank.
With our API you can interact with all the services we use in our own bunq app, such as:
Transactional data Initiated payments Push notifications for every transaction Scheduled payments Payment requests Accounts for groups Card ordering Limits and budgets etc, etc.
Loads of developers are working with the bunq API already. More than 25 applications have working integrations up and running for our users to enjoy. All these apps and services solve user ‘problems’ in a way that a bank could never do.
For these developers, budgeting, bookkeeping, saving or investing are their core services. Their own implementations are way better than anything a bank can come up with, even if they would be as flexible as bunq.
Bright future
So is PSD2 a moot point? We don’t need it to push innovation, just look at bunq, Starling Bank and Fidor. That being said, we will need it in order to give us more choice and gain greater acceptance. It will help us create a universal ecosystem where banks go back to being banks, and where customers have a wide range of services to choose from.
The future is bright and you can already experience the promised freedom today. We will keep innovating and hope the horde will soon follow. Be it by force from PSD2 or because they will see the light themselves.
