The SEPA Payment Account Access scheme is driving ‘open banking’ in the EU beyond the revised Payments Services Directive

This paper presents the SEPA Payment Account Access (SPAA) scheme, exploring its origins, associated benefits and challenges as well as the related regulatory context. The SPAA scheme covers the set of rules, practices and standards that allow for premium, value-added open banking services beyond the regulatory requirements. The revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) describes the legal framework for open banking in Europe. It obliges account servicing payment service providers to provide — free of charge — dedicated interfaces to allow regulated third parties to access an account holder’s payment account with consent of the account holder. With this access, third parties are permitted to provide ‘basic’ open banking services regulated under PSD2. Not long after PSD2 was implemented, the Euro Retail Payments Board started exploring the possibilities for a potential SEPA application programming interface (API) access scheme for premium, valueadded services beyond PSD2. This resulted in several recommendations and a formal invitation to the European Payments Council (EPC), which subsequently developed the SPAA scheme. The SPAA scheme enables ‘premium’ payment services beyond the regulatory requirements of PSD2 and supports a wide variety of payments use cases, including online and in-store. It aims to drive open banking in the European Union (EU) in a way that unlocks and creates value while allowing for a fair distribution of value and risk between participants. SPAA is a pan-European scheme that underpins the EU’s objective of payments sovereignty, is supported by the relevant EU institutions and developed collaboratively in a multi-stakeholder setup by the retail payments industry. In addition to the SPAA scheme rulebook, a default asset remuneration model based on a cost calculation methodology has been developed to support the scheme. The SPAA scheme has the potential to further drive payments innovation and could be regarded as a stepping-stone towards open finance beyond payments as well as ‘open data’ beyond finance.