Wed, February 1

The SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES team commissioned by the Confederation of Digital Business has implemented a draft Standard for conducting settlements using open payment banking APIs.

Banks of Belarus have long been interested in opening payment APIs for their partners. Open APIs, or open programming interfaces, help banks interact with each other and with fintech service providers.

The Confederation of Digital Business needed an expert company that could implement this project. Through the tender, SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES was selected as the developer of the draft Calculation Standard.

At the initial stage, as part of the preparation, our team studied the international experience of implementing and developing open APIs in the financial market. When implementing the draft of Calculation Standard, the best international practices of Great Britain, the European Union, Russia were borrowed; took into account the requirements of the Banking Community, which includes representatives of banks, NKFO and CCB.

In the process of working on the project, the SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES team developed 49 API methods and about 50 schemes. The requirements for the creation of the methods of the draft Calculation Standard were synchronized with the methodology of ISO 20022. At weekly meetings, representatives of our company and the Banking Community solved current problems and coordinated issues related to the draft Standard.

The developed draft Calculation Standard was approved by the Working Group of representatives of banks and the IT sector. Subsequently, the National Bank, on the basis of the project, approved the final document. The text of the Settlement Standard is officially published on the NBRB website at the level of a legislative act:

https://www.nbrb.by/legislation/documents/spr_6-02-1-2022.pdf https://www.nbrb.by/legislation/documents/spr_6.02-2-2022.pdf

What is the advantage of the developed Standard?

Previously, banks developed only information APIs to provide information about banking services. And only its own customers had the opportunity to connect to payment APIs. In addition, each bank had its own information exchange protocols, which is extremely inconvenient for those participants in the payment system who wanted to connect to the API of several banks at the same time.

Now the introduction of open payment banking APIs has become mandatory and, thanks to the development of SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES, uniform, which significantly simplified the process of connecting to open bank APIs for all participants in the payment system of Belarus.