Chi Onwurah – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the HM Treasury
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Chi Onwurah on 2016-10-19.
To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what safeguards the Government plans to put in place to protect customers from fraud and cyber security risks if they use new products and services in an open banking environment.
Simon Kirby
Improving the resilience of the finance sector to risks such as cyber security is a priority for the Government. HM Treasury works closely with the financial regulators to drive this improvement; it is their responsibility to supervise banks’ operations. The Financial Conduct Authority has a specific objective on consumer protection.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published the final report of its market investigation into retail banking on 9 August 2016. As part of this the CMA requires the nine largest UK banks to develop and adopt an open banking standard for application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow access to customer account information, as set out in the revised Payment Services Directive (PSDII) which will come into force in January 2018. These nine banks are required to deliver open data APIs by Q1 2017, and deliver the full open API banking standard by early 2018. Data protection and cyber security are key considerations in PSDII, and the Government will be consulting on the transposition of this directive shortly.
