The Swisscom Open Banking Hub is being used for the first time to support the cooperation between Baloise Bank SoBa and RegTech start-up Apiax. For banks and their customer advisors, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements at all times is a major challenge, particularly when customers are from outside Switzerland. Apiax's cross-border solution supports customer advisors by automatically checking which banking products can be offered to specific customers on the basis of a digital rule set. The Apiax solution can be used as a mobile app or connected to the bank's systems over an application programming interface (API for short).
If Baloise Bank SoBa wanted to use services of other FinTech companies or other third parties, additional interfaces would have to be set up. This complicates the entire system and results in high initial and operating costs. Instead of requiring a new interface for each additional connection, Swisscom's Open Banking Hub offers every market player access to all available APIs on the hub through a single connection.
The Swisscom Open Banking Hub runs on the API gateway solution of CA Technologies. The API hub operates on two levels: the API Sandbox gives financial services providers a simple and no-obligation opportunity to try out new applications of third parties who are already connected to the Open Banking Hub. Productive use of the third-party solutions is possible via the Hub within the secure bank IT infrastructure on which Swisscom already operates the core banking systems of around 80 financial services providers and which meets the most stringent compliance and security requirements. This is another advantage of connecting via the Swisscom Hub because meeting the stringent compliance requirements of the banks is a major challenge for third parties, especially FinTech companies.