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Banking & Open Banking

Expose account and payment APIs to third-party providers with consent flows and a full audit trail—one control plane for open banking.

Practical use cases

Concrete ways teams use Zerq for this scenario.

  • Let aggregators show account balances and initiate payments

    A licensed third-party app (e.g. budget or payment initiator) requests the customer’s consent, then calls your account and payment APIs. The gateway enforces per-TPP limits, records every consent and call for regulators, and returns standard status codes so the TPP can handle errors and retries correctly.

  • Onboard new TPPs without custom integrations

    New licensed providers get access through your developer portal: they discover available products (e.g. accounts, payments), obtain credentials, and test against sandbox. You assign products and rate limits per TPP; the same gateway serves all of them with one audit trail.

  • Prove who accessed what for regulators

    When auditors or regulators ask who accessed which accounts or initiated which payments, you filter logs by TPP, product, and time. Consent and API usage are in one place, with no need to correlate multiple systems.

Outcomes

  • Compliance-ready open banking exposure with one control plane.
  • Consent and SCA flows implemented as workflows without hard-coded gateway logic.
  • Per-TPP limits and audit trail for regulators and internal risk.
  • Faster TPP onboarding via developer portal and self-service discovery.

How Zerq helps

  • Token and certificate validation against your identity provider or custom issuers; optional client certificate (mTLS) for high-assurance TPPs.
  • Workflow designer to implement consent and redirect flows: conditional routing, custom response nodes (e.g. 202), and reference to previous step data for state.
  • Per-partner access and quotas so each TPP sees only allowed products and has enforceable rate limits; IP allowlists for additional lock-down.
  • Full audit trail of configuration and API usage; structured logs (JSON) and Prometheus metrics; filter by product, partner, and time for regulatory reports.
  • API products and versions with drafts/publishing; organize AIS, PIS, and identity under separate products with different policies.
  • Run on-prem or in your DC for data residency; no outbound runtime dependency for air-gapped deployments.
For architects & evaluators (technical context, requirements)

Technical context

Under PSD2 and regional open-banking standards (e.g. UK Open Banking, Berlin Group), banks must expose account and payment APIs to licensed third-party providers (TPPs). The gateway must implement a protocol layer and REST facade, support OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect and often FAPI 1 Advanced, handle consent flows (e.g. 202 redirects for SCA), enforce idempotency, and return standard status codes (429, 401, 403). Message signing (JWS) and encryption are common; consent duration and SCA methods vary by region.

Technical requirements

  • OAuth 2.0 / OIDC and optional FAPI 1 Advanced; SCA (redirect, embedded, or decoupled).
  • Consent and authorization orchestration with multi-step flows (e.g. 202 → user input → 200).
  • Per-TPP access and rate limits; idempotency for payment and consent endpoints.
  • Full audit trail of consent, access, and API usage for regulators.
  • RESTful APIs with JSON; optional ISO 20022 and regional message formats.

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