What?

The Open Bank Project is a European initiative to open up financial transactions to much larger groups of individuals and raise the bar of financial transparency. It will achieve this by allowing a diverse range of third-party software applications (including fraud analysis tools, web apps, mobile apps, social widgets and payment gateways) to access any bank account that supports the Open Bank Protocol and API. Once a bank supports the Open Bank Protocol, account holders could opt in to the protocol and choose which groups of users would have access to the account. Security will be assured by a combination of in-house security expertise and scrutiny from the open source community.

Why?

In Europe, it is estimated that over €30 Billion are lost to fraud and corruption each year. In a recent survey, 78% of European citizens considered corruption to be a problem in their own country. Recent financial crises raise other questions about our financial systems. The success of "Web 2.0", "crowd sourcing" and "open source" demonstrates that the public - and commerce - can make great use of open data (wikipedia) and open tools (linux, apache, firefox). Greater open connectivity to financial systems will result in increased choice and quality for the consumer.

How?

The Open Bank Project would facilitate a wide range of applications. Some examples are:

• Fraud detection software could scan transaction data spanning multiple accounts and banks in near real time.
• The EU or other funding bodies could insist that recipients use a publicly accessible Open Bank Protocol enabled account. This would engage public vigilance (“many eyes”), confidence and creativity at a financial level. In short, the public funds, the public sees.
• A charity wants to demonstrate to its sponsors that it is transparent and provides value for money. Donors and the public could view and comment on costs and make "better deal" suggestions.
• A company wants to grant access to a limited group of users e.g. the CEO, accountants and certain staff could access bank data from their mobile phones or accounting systems.
• Individuals want to open their own transactions to their friends. Twitter: "Oh my god, you spent €200 on Nike!?" Facebook: "You shouldn't support that company."
• A University opens its accounts via its web site for comments.
• A third party website could aggregate financial data from a range of public bodies and generate trends, statistics, graphs, analysis and discussion from the raw data. For instance, all the electricity companies in Germany could be monitored.
• A new type of bank emerges where all the accounts are open! This could cause a quantum shift in societies attitude towards money: A community of private and business account holders could form that follow and comment on purchases and make recommendations. Banks and suppliers would have their logos next to transactions. The public could browse, follow and discover good deals and spot irregularities.
• Services such as Mobile payment gateways can integrate their systems with their Bank in a cost effective, secure and trusted manner.

The Open Bank Project will define and produce API standards, open source software and a hardware appliance that can connect to bank systems and securely expose certain accounts' data to authorized (may be public) users.

Our aim is that the OPEN BANK PROJECT API achieves IETF RFC Internet Standard status.

Who?

We are building a consortium of European companies and institutions that will apply for EU funding under the ITEA2 scheme or similar. So far we have a good range of companies and research institutions across Europe involved.

Can You help?

We are seeking industry partners. Banks and large software companies with banking related products and services are especially welcome.

Contact?

TESOBE is a small software house in Berlin, Germany specializing in web applications, databases and open source technologies. Details are here