FMA grants transitional period for PSD2 interfaces

As of 14 September 2019, third-party providers will no longer be allowed to access customer interfaces via ‘screen scraping’, as before, but only via PSD2-compliant interfaces. There are two access possibilities: either the bank provides its own interface for third-party providers, or it continues to allow access via the usual customer interface adapted to the PSD2.

If a dedicated interface is set up, the so-called ‘emergency mechanism’ must ensure that third parties can access the normal customer interface if the dedicated interface does not work. However, banks may request an exception to the provision of this emergency mechanism. The FMA must decide on this request.

In the course of the evaluation of the applications and the complaints received from the third-party providers, it turned out that there are currently deficits in the implementation of the dedicated interfaces, which means that the legal requirements cannot yet be fully met.

To date, the FMA has therefore not been able to grant an exemption from the provision of the emergency mechanism. However, as there are currently doubts regarding the functioning of the emergency mechanism, the FMA has decided to continue to approve the access methods of third-party providers until all technical difficulties on the part of the banks have been resolved. The FMA assumes that all existing problems will be resolved promptly, and that from this point in time only PSD2-compliant interfaces will be used by third-party providers.

Ralf Ohlhausen, Vice-Chairman of ETPPA and member of the Joint PSD2 Task Force, commented: ‘Thankfully, the Austrian regulator has also taken the right decisions to ensure that insufficient APIs are not enforced onto TPPs and thereby avoided negative impact on all their consumer and corporate customers. With two days to go I can only pray that all the regulators, which are still sitting on the fence, will jump down quickly on the right side to make PSD2 a success and not a failure!’