(5 June 2018 – UK) Citibank has become the first corporate bank to join the UK’s Open Banking framework to provide an aggregated payments collections service for its business clients, tapping into the APIs of the country’s nine biggest banks.
Citi has enrolled as a Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP), with a view to meeting the evolving needs of treasurers for easy access to payment data without the need to build applications or interfaces to connect to proprietary banking portal.
Open Banking in the UK, which was rolled out at the start of the year, requires the nine largest UK banks to publish APIs, enabling regulated third party providers to access bank accounts securely and with account holder consent.
While most of the focus on Open Banking has been centred on the benefits to fintech startups, Citi is taking advantage of the framework to streamline the business of collecting and making payments on behalf of its business customers.
Citi EMEA head of payments and receivables, treasury and trade solutions, Ireti Samuel-Ogbu, says inclusion in the directory is part of a wider shift in the global banking landscape from batch processing to real-time payments and collections as banking systems become accessible through APIs.