Some financial institutions will be exempt from participating in the open financeexpanded version of open banking, data sharing system between banks. The Central Bank (BC) issued, this Thursday (23), two resolutions that intend to make the system more agile.
Until this BC decision, all institutions holding accounts (current, prepaid and savings) were required to participate in the open finance. Now, institutions that offer an account but do not allow transactions via electronic means (such as apps and websites) may choose not to be part of the system.
They will also be released from joining the open banking institutions that do not have individuals, individual micro-entrepreneurs, micro-enterprises and small businesses as clients.
The resolutions take effect on April 1.
Justifications
In a note, the BC explained that the changes are intended to make “the participation of institutions in the payment initiation phase more efficient”. Widely applied to credit cards, payment initiation allows a company to charge for a service or merchandise through a linkwithout the customer needing to access the bank application.
The expansion of payment initiators for transactions such as bank transfer or Pix depends on the data sharing offered by open finance. According to the Central Bank, the permanence of institutions that do not make payments by electronic means or that only work with large companies was delaying the evolution of the service.
In the first case, explained the BC, the institutions that work with customer profiles that do not use electronic payment channels make it impossible to carry out the phases provided for in the open finance, such as consent, authentication, and confirmation. These steps can only be performed electronically.
In the second case, the institutions were released from being part of the open finance because they only have large business groups as customers, who make payments in batches. According to BC, the open finance, at the moment, does not cover this type of transaction. The agency promised to reassess the waiver when a technological solution is developed that allows data sharing for this business model.
specific cases
The new rules provide for two other specific situations in which institutions could be exempted from integrating the open finance. The first occurs when they offer free movement accounts only to a specific and limited set of individual customers, such as their own employees and the like, or when mandatory participation does not bring significant benefits to customers.
In the second specific situation, the waiver of open finance will occur when institutions offer customers to operate accounts through electronic channels only in contingency situations.
Definition
The BC also changed the definitions about the directory of participants and about the responsibility for managing its information. Now, the exclusion of an institution participating in the open finance or the change of participation modality requires prior approval from the monetary authority.
One of the resolutions updated the name of the open financial system, whose name changed from open banking for open finance in March 2022. “The changes refer to formal adjustments and clarifications, the main one being to bring greater clarity as to the scope of monitoring assigned to the governance structure responsible for implementing the open finance. It is already foreseen that Resolution nº 32 will undergo periodic reviews in order to reflect the evolution of the ecosystem”, informed the BC.
