SIX Orchestrates Swiss OpenWealth API Roundtable for Financial Institutions

Swiss Fintech Innovations (SFTI), OpenWealth (orchestrated by Synpulse) and b.Link of SIX are jointly initiating a roundtable for Swiss financial institutions to discuss the state of open banking.

Four and a half months ago SIX officially launched the open banking hub “b.Link”. With the first two applications within payment submission (PSS) and account information services (AIS), SIX enables software providers to automatically connect their solutions with their customer’s bank accounts.

In September, SIX entered into partnership with LuxHub, an open banking provider that has already developed these functionalities for the European market and will support them in implementation.

OpenWealth API Roundtable for Financial Institutions

To drive the implementation and establishment of the OpenWealth API standard on the market in a structured way, together with Synpulse and SFTI, SIX has invited various cantonal (district) and private banks to a physical roundtable on 29 October and has been purportedly met with great interest.

SIX will present the results of the discussions and corresponding clarifications at a virtual follow-up event with additional capacity for participants. Financial institutions that are interested to participate may contact SIX for further information.

Expansion to New Scopes of Application: Asset Management

SIX will use the momentum to connect more financial institutions and third-party providers to the two existing payment APIs.

However, it is equally important to expand open banking in Switzerland to new scopes of application in various customer segments. Together with financial institutions and third-party providers, SIX will continuously evaluate possible use cases to expand b.Link to.

SIX is currently taking account of the great interest in wealth management. The primary objective is to provide independent asset managers with modern interfaces.

This generally provides similar possibilities as in the case of the previously mentioned scopes of application AIS and PSS, only applied to securities portfolios rather than customer bank accounts.

Moreover, the focus is no longer primarily on business customers. Open banking in Switzerland will soon bring benefit not only to businesses, but also to private individuals.

At the end of June, St.Galler Kantonalbank and Synpulse in cooperation with six providers of portfolio management systems launched the “OpenWealth” community.

At the end of September, the first version of an API standard for wealth management was developed in consultation with “Common API” of SFTI and made accessible to the community.

In the next step, it is now the time to operationalize this newly created standard and establish it in a wider community of financial institutions and third-party providers as efficiently and simply as possible.