Axway helps financial institutions move beyond PSD2 as a compliance obligation, turning it into a catalyst for acceleration by anchoring PSD2 (and soon, PSD3) fulfillment in a broader open banking strategy.
Read PSD2 — the electroshock and aftermath to dive deeper into PSD2.
What is PSD2?
PSD2 (the Second Payment Services Directive) is a European regulation governing electronic payment services. Its core objective is to make payments in Europe more secure, competitive, and innovative.
Building on the original Payment Services Directive (PSD) from 2007, PSD2 introduced new regulated services in 2015, including payment initiation services (PIS) and account information services (AIS), while strengthening customer protection and security requirements.
The key points of PSD2 are:
- Strengthening the resilience and security of the European payments ecosystem
- Enabling innovation by allowing regulated third parties to access banking data via APIs
- Creating a more level competitive playing field between banks and Fintechs
In June of 2023, the European Commission published its proposal for PSD3, alongside a new Payment Services Regulation (PSR). Together, they aim to modernize payment services, reinforce open banking foundations, and address inconsistencies in PSD2 implementation — signaling a shift from compliance toward enablement.
Differences between open banking and PSD2
While PSD2 is EU legislation, Open Banking (capitalized) refers specifically to the UK’s regulatory and technical framework for PSD2 implementation.
More broadly, open banking (lowercase) describes a model in which banks securely expose data and services to third parties through APIs — a concept that extends well beyond PSD2 itself.
In practice, “open banking” is often used as shorthand for PSD2 across Europe, even though the regulation covers only a subset of banking services.
Just the beginning
The introduction of PSD3 follows the general trend of banks embracing the possibilities APIs can provide for better service. However, when customers open up their systems to the open banking model, they can run into problems with governance.
Axway is your vendor of choice
Axway has over 30 years of experience managing the information system and all the moving parts of APIs by meeting the customer’s needs for providing a fast and secure response to regulatory requirements.
Our customers revel in trustworthy products that meet the most stringent level of security certifications, including Common Criteria EAL4+. With Axway’s Amplify Platform, your enterprise has the most effective solution to solve the PSD2 necessity requirement.
We enable banks to govern and scale open banking securely, meeting regulatory requirements while exposing APIs in a controlled, auditable, and enterprise‑grade way. Axway is the only API provider that has the validation of its security process via Common Criteria EAL4+.
LUXHUB: Delivering open banking at speed and scale
Meeting PSD2 requirements can be particularly challenging for small and medium-sized players in the financial services sector, since these organizations typically have lean IT teams with limited development resources at their disposal.
Founded in 2018 by four major Luxembourg banks, LUXHUB created an open banking platform built on our Amplify Platform that could deliver open banking APIs at speed and scale.
The platform incorporates specifications for open banking APIs designed to French and pan-European standards, as well as comprehensive consent workflows — enabling customers to authorize their data for use in open banking services. With prebuilt PSD2 sandboxes, the company can onboard new customers within days, not months — helping banks and financial services organizations to comply quickly and cost-effectively.
Today, LUXHUB offers more than 35 open APIs and processes over seven million API calls a month on its open banking platform.
“Since we launched, we’ve not had a single customer leave our open banking platform because of service-related issues. That’s a testament to how solid and secure our solution is.”
– Anne-Sophie Morvan, Chief Commercial Officer at LUXHUB
Read the full case study to learn how LUXHUB is cutting time to market for new products.
Groupe BPCE: Powering large‑scale open banking through a unified API platform
PSD2 compliance was also a key driver for Groupe BPCE, one of France’s largest banking groups, in embracing an API-driven architecture. But they also saw the wide range of benefits open banking could offer the bank, such as making it easier and faster for the bank’s development teams to build new services for its customers and nurture long-term loyalty.
By embracing a single, central API marketplace built on Amplify Platform, the group can implement consistent governance and information security policies across the entire organization, while enabling tightly integrated operations across all business units.
Groupe BPCE processes more than 10 billion API calls per year with 99.9% availability — enabling the organization to meet its PSD2 regulatory obligations while delivering innovative customer-facing services.
Axway is the strategic vendor your company needs to create the right vision for your future. Our experts strategists can provide sound advice to companies and financial institutions to help them along the way in their open banking journey.
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