A pioneer in open finance headquartered in Milan, Italy, Fabrick helps banks and third-party solution providers connect and innovate together.
With Axway’s Amplify API Management Platform, the open finance service provider goes beyond regulatory compliance to harness new data-driven services. Discover how Fabrick and Axway together are lifting the speed, convenience, and security of the customer experience to new heights.
Europe sets the scene for open banking
In 2017, the EU’s European Commission launched the second Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) to regulate payment and service providers all over the EU and European Economic Area. The move was a shock to the system for many well-established banks in Europe and had ripple effects globally.
What is PSD2? It aims to create a more cohesive European payments market and add equivalent rules between banks and fintechs to set a level playing field. It also helps build a safer payment system that’s more secure for customers in the long run.
Effectively, it means some of the biggest banks globally have to securely open up their data, notably via APIs. For consumers, this means changes in the ways we use and move our money around.
Seeing regulation as an opportunity to lead on innovation
A number of established banking institutions saw PSD2 as a threat, worried about losing their customer relationships or having to rethink their business models. Others saw it as an opportunity to transform the financial landscape for the better.
Fabrick sits solidly in the latter camp, jumping at the chance to not just comply with regulation, but also take steps to harness new data-driven services to build collaborative offerings. Fabrick sees Open Finance as an evolution of open banking combined with Open Payments.
For Axway’s experts, it’s clear that PSD2 is just the first step. As Axway Catalyst, Emmanuel Methivier wrote:
“[PSD2] has enabled financial institutions to understand that open banking, imposed by the regulator, is not a source of risk. We now need to initiate a second stage in the project, which will lead the banks to embrace the business opportunity that these new distribution channels (APIs) can present. Banks still need to understand the benefits of embracing this new distribution channel by offering a complete opening of their services in the form of an Open API,” added Methivier.
Giulio Rattone, Chief Information Officer at Fabrick, explains that the financial services provider had an opportunity: Traditional banking revenues were in a steady decline, and new challenger banks were disrupting established players by differentiating themselves through seamless, personalized, and highly responsive customer experiences.
“We saw the chance to do something unique: create a space where banks, Fintechs, and businesses could discover, collaborate and co-create innovative solutions for their customers,” said Rattone.
Protecting mission-critical financial data, cost-effectively
Fabrick chose to build its new open finance platform on Axway’s Amplify API Management, an open platform that automates the discovery, reuse, and governance of APIs.
The financial services industry is highly regulated, and a company like Fabrick can’t afford even a minute of unplanned downtime for its new ecosystem. Amplify provides bulletproof security, stability, and high-availability capabilities.
Flexibility and scalability were also crucial to achieving Fabrick’s long-term ambition to become Europe’s leading open ecosystem of financial services.
Supporting dramatic growth and strong partnerships
One strong indicator of the company’s success is the fact that many organizations arrive on the platform as consumers of APIs and become producers publishing their own services on Fabrick’s ecosystem.
Today, Amplify is at the heart of Fabrick’s rapidly growing open finance ecosystem, and Axway continues to provide support and guidance as needed to support the partnership.
Fabrick has over 250 partners, using 500 APIs to deliver 16 data-driven services: from PSD2 compliance solutions for banks to banking-as-a-service offerings for Fintechs.
“In one year, our API calls grew from one million transactions per month to one million per day — and our API volumes are growing by a factor of ten year-on-year,” concluded Rattone.
“Amplify API Management Platform gives us the security, scalability, and cost-efficiency to expand our open ecosystem across Italy and beyond, and we’re excited to continue our work with Axway as we bring service innovation to stakeholders across Europe.”
Read more about how Fabrick and Axway collaborated for a great success story.