The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) on Wednesday launched the ‘Open Banking Lab’ initiative, in line with its Open Banking Framework issued in November 2022.
The new initiative aims to enable innovation and accelerate the development of open banking services in the kingdom.
The lab will provide banks and fintechs with a technical testing environment to enable them to develop, test, and certify their open banking services to ensure compatibility with the Open Banking Framework.
Open banking services is a new concept in the financial industry to enable the consumers of financial institutions to securely share their financial data with a third party provider for seeking various financial services and products.
This is expected to lead to strengthening of partnership between banks and fintechs and improving the financial infrastructure to guarantee better use of consumers’ financial data.
The implementation of open banking services is one of the initiatives of the fintech strategy, one of the pillars of the Financial Sector Development Program (FSDP) under Saudi Vision 2030.
The Saudi Central Bank released the Open Banking Framework in November 2022, which includes a comprehensive set of legislation, regulatory guidelines and technical standards based on international best practices to enable banks and fintechs to provide open banking services in the kingdom.
The first version of the open banking services focused on the account information service (AIS), and the second version will focus on the payment initiation service (PIS).
SAMA is tracking the development of banks and fintechs to ensure their readiness to launch open banking services within the first quarter of 2023.
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