TESOBE, www.tesobe.com (Technical Solutions Berlin) today announces its launch of The Open Bank Project, OBP www.openbankproject.com. The OBP is a European initiative looking to open up financial transactions to much larger groups of individuals and raise the bar of financial transparency by using the Open Source and Web 2.0 approach.
Originally inspired as a reaction to corruption, the project has grown to serve many additional needs and tackle a wide range of problems.
The aim is to work together with a consortium of banks, Open Source and Web 2.0 experts, software companies, institutions and universities and create an open source platform which enables the opening of financial transactions via a secure and trusted API. A more open and transparent financial system will then result in increased choice and quality for the consumer.
The Open Bank Project already has partners from Germany, France, UK, Finland, Israel and Egypt involved. Its current focus is to increase the number of partners and to apply for EU funding for the project.
Example of use cases on how the project can serve governments, businesses, individuals and society at large:
1. Fraud detection software could scan transaction data spanning multiple accounts and banks in near real time.
2. The EU or other funding bodies could insist that recipients use a publicly accessible Open Bank Project enabled account. This would engage public vigilance (“many eyes”), confidence and creativity at a financial level. In short, the public funds, the public sees.
3. A charity wants to demonstrate to its sponsors that it is transparent and provides value for money. Donors and the public could view and comment on costs and make "better deal" suggestions.
4. A company wants to grant access to a limited group of users e.g. the CEO, accountants and certain staff could access bank data from their mobile phones or accounting systems.
5. Individuals want to open their own transactions to their friends. Twitter: "Oh my god, you spent €200 on Brand X!?" Facebook: "You shouldn't support that company."
6. Services such as Mobile payment gateways can integrate their systems with their Bank in a cost effective, secure and trusted manner.
7. Banks want to offer a greater range of software tools and services to their clients in a cost effective and secure manner.
“Finding a way to fight corruption and misuse of tax payer’s money was the original inspiration to develop a banking platform where accounts are open for the public to see. The latest financial crisis and the current situation in Greece motivated me to develop the idea further, to create a consortium of partners and seek EU funding,” comments Simon Redfern, founder and CEO of TESOBE and founder of the Open Bank Project.
“ATB is supporting the Open Bank Project because we think that an open source API platform, accessible to the world's web and application developers, will open up many opportunities for ATB to design and offer new services which can be operated on a secure and trusted platform”, says Uwe Kirchhoff. General Manager of the Institute for Applied System Technology - ATB-Bremen
“We think the Open Bank Project is important because it will help integrating the mobile payment solutions and the banks. The proposed project provides a standard set of banking APIs and enables third parties to access a bank’s platform via a secure, transparent and interoperable mechanism without violating the security roles or any regulatory constraints imposed by the banks. In emerging countries, distribution channels, small businesses and mobile operators could partner with banks to offer mobile financial services to bring the ‘unbanked’
"We have become a partner of the Open Bank Project because it is very forward thinking but at the same time faces various technical challenges - for example data mining. Our expertise lies in the field of mining complex data and we will therefore be able to support the team by developing necessary concepts and solutions. Furthermore we feel that the idea has very large market perspective and look forward to supporting it along the way", concludes Dr. Chaabane Djeraba, Professor of Computer Science at the University Lille1, CNRS, France.
