Finnova and SIX have opted for a technical partnership in the area of open finance.

In the future, Swiss banks that use Finnova’s core banking system will be able to connect seamlessly to bLink, the open-finance platform from SIX, via an API hub. As of this year, the doors to the open-finance ecosystem will thus be open to a large majority of the Swiss financial center. The two infrastructure providers agree that this will accelerate the development and adaption of API-based business models in Switzerland in a decisive way.

Platforms such as bLink from SIX play an important role in the implementation of open finance in the Swiss financial center. Finnova, one of the leading software and service providers on the Swiss banking scene, is also convinced of this. In a technical partnership, it is therefore providing a standardized back-end connection to the bLink APIs. This way, it is ensuring technically uniform and efficient conditions for a connection to the platform for banks that use Finnova’s core banking system.

bLink has continued to grow in recent months. The existing APIs for account information and payment submissions have been joined by three standardized interfaces relating to asset management. In addition, various new participants have connected to the platform, including St.Galler Kantonalbank and bexio.

In recent years, Finnova has actively helped to shape open finance. In light of the increasing dynamic development of demand for open finance, both Finnova and SIX are pursuing a multi-dimensional strategy with professional partners and scalable, secure solutions. In order to account for the various opening strategies and the heterogeneous operator landscape of financial institutions in the Finnova community, Finnova is developing its own open-banking-as-a-service offering, which acts as an API hub.

“The bLink back-end connection is the common technical denominator for the secure and technologically guaranteed connection of the financial institutions in the Finnova community to the open finance platform from SIX. The cooperation with SIX is therefore the next logical step to provide extra momentum to open banking in Switzerland. With the expansion of our own open banking-as-a-service offering toward bLink, Finnova can offer an open-banking-as-a-service solution integrated into the core banking system from a single source,” says Sven Biellmann, Product Manager Open Finance.

Banks can choose to access bLink via the independent API hubs from Finnova, Swisscom or Inventx. They take over the API management and the implementation of the required consent flow for the financial institution. For each operator, Finnova ensures the integration of the bLink APIs into its core banking system. The new partnership between Finnova and SIX therefore provides a common technical denominator for the respective individual open banking projects.

The complementary open banking offerings of the participating hubs are still strictly subject to free competition. This generates further added value for the participating banks, because, by implementing a single connection, they can procure directly selected services from multiple independent platforms, or offer them themselves.