At the recent Fintech Nation event in Dublin, a lot was said about two particular acronyms, API and PSD2, which will play a crucial role in the years to come.
One of the panel discussions at the event focused on payments, which is perhaps the one area of fintech that the average person on the street is going to interact with on a daily basis, through contactless payments or, in some countries, mobile payments like Apple Pay.
But, behind the scenes, software developers in start-ups and SMEs are busy developing open-source software for financial institutions to use, with the ability to tweak it to their own design using APIs. Equally crucial, it seems, is the EU’s Directive on Payment Services 2 (PSD2), which was enacted in 2013, which created an equal playing field for payment service providers, as well as emerging start-ups looking to move into payments.
Words by Colm Gorey
