What is Open Banking?
Open Banking is a regulatory and technology-driven framework that allows banks to securely share customer financial data with authorized third-party providers. This is typically enabled through APIs and is designed to promote competition, innovation, and improved services in the financial sector.
In the European Union, Open Banking compliance is mandated by the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). It requires financial institutions to provide secure access to account data and payment functionality while ensuring the privacy and security of customer information.
As banks open their systems to external parties, the need for robust security increases. Network segmentation, access controls, and secure transmission protocols are essential to protect the infrastructure supporting Open Banking APIs.
Need to secure your Open Banking infrastructure? See how Tufin helps enforce network-level controls for PSD2 compliance. Request a Demo!
Open Banking Requirements
While Open Banking focuses heavily on application-level controls, several infrastructure-level requirements are critical to ensuring secure access. Tufin supports enforcement of the network security practices needed to meet these requirements.
Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)
Banks must verify customer identity using multi-factor authentication before granting access to data or initiating payments. While Tufin does not provide authentication services, it helps ensure only authorized paths exist to sensitive systems.
Secure API Infrastructure
All API traffic must be encrypted and directed only to approved services. This requires firewalls, security groups, and network controls that permit access only from validated sources.
Consent-Based Access Control
Customer consent is central to Open Banking. While consent management is handled at the application level, network policies must enforce access boundaries to ensure third-party providers only reach approved systems.
Third-Party Risk Management
Banks are responsible for securing connections to third-party providers. This includes restricting access to only necessary services and isolating external traffic from internal systems that do not need to communicate with Open Banking components.
Availability and Incident Response
The Open Banking infrastructure must remain highly available and resilient. Institutions must be able to contain potential threats and maintain secure operations under pressure.
Tufin and Open Banking Compliance
With Tufin, you can define, enforce, and monitor network security controls that support Open Banking initiatives. You can isolate API infrastructure, establish global network access policies, and track every change to ensure secure and compliant connectivity.
Protect the API layer with access boundaries
Tufin helps you create dedicated network zones for API gateways and supporting services. You can define clear access rules for inbound and outbound connections, and limit traffic to only what is required and justified for a specific business purpose.
By managing these rules centrally, you can more easily maintain least-privilege access policies and report on compliance across the hybrid network.
Isolate third-party connections and enforce segmentation
Tufin allows you to define clear and distinct network segments using Zones, which can be used to isolate internal systems from third party applications and integrations.
Establishing clear and well defined access policies for how third-party tools and applications access the network is an effective component of your overall risk management strategy.
Validate and approve changes before implementation
Tufin simulates the effect of proposed access changes before they are implemented. If a proposed change violates compliance policies or introduces an overly permissive or risky configuration, the ticket can be escalated for additional analysis or review.
All changes are documented and tracked in Tufin, which provides a comprehensive audit trail and streamlined audit reporting.
Maintain a continuous state of audit readiness
Tufin helps you generate reports that demonstrate compliance with well defined access controls around critical network assets and potentially risky third party applications and integrations.
