Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what the timeline is for implementing the Open Banking Standard; and how he plans to ensure that sensitive banking data passes safely and securely from banks to third parties when that standard is implemented.

Treasury ministers and officials have meetings with a wide variety of organisations in the public and private sectors as part of the process of policy development and delivery. Details of ministerial and permanent secretary meetings with external organisations on departmental business are published on a quarterly basis and are available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmt-ministers-meetings-hospitality-gifts-and-overseas-travel

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 and midata 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.