Where to find the PSD2 technical specification?

Question

PSD2, The Payment Services Directive of the EU.

Financial institutions in the EU need to be PSD2 compliant, and there's a bunch of vendors claiming PSD2 compliancy. PSD2 is supposed to be a uniform EU-wide standard, and there's a million whitepapers, video blogs, impact estimates, high level overviews, but no technical specification.

Nothing saying really what message needs to be sent where and then happens what. The closest thing I found is this but even there there's no reference, nothing to imply what exact technical spec they followed.

Does anybody know where to get the official PSD2 technical requirements?

EDIT: I tried my luck with the developers of openbanking project

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PS I understand that this question is technically a "questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam"

This question must have a unique and precise answer from a single regulator - the EC, this is not an opinionated answers area.

Answer 1

I got an answer from the "owner" of the OBP project, I'm posting it verbatim:

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Regarding the current status, Open Bank Project API develop branch currently supports OBP API specs 1.2.1 through 3.0.0

We also have an ISO20022 connector (PAIN) for initiating payments.

You can read the OBP specs here:

https://apiexplorersandbox.openbankproject.com/

or use the Swagger:

https://apisandbox.openbankproject.com/obp/v1.4.0/resource-docs/v3.0.0/swagger

or Resource Docs (our own format):

https://apisandbox.openbankproject.com/obp/v1.4.0/resource-docs/v3.0.0/obp

(the Swagger / Resource Doc links can also be found at the bottom of the API Explorer)

Regarding PSD2, PSD2 doesn't explain exactly how countries should comply (e.g. it doesn't define URLs etc.). However, it does say in Article 28 point 3: "Account servicing payment service providers shall also ensure that the dedicated interface uses ISO 20022 elements, components or approved message definitions, for financial messaging".

This is why STET (the recent French standard) uses field names like "PmtTpInf", "InstrPrty", "SvcLvl" and "Cd" etc.

In addtion to the OBP standards mentioned above, we aim to support:

An ISO 20022 version of OBP. This will most likely be requested using a different Mime type on the current OBP URLs and will be implemented as an automatic translation of OBP terms to ISO20022 equivelents (where they exist). We'll probably support ISO20022 short field names and also longer type names (which are verbose but are more self describing).

1. UK Open Banking standard
2. STET (French)
3. Other Country standards.

Thus OBP API will be able to surface multiple standards using one OBP instance and backend connector. It will provide easy to use REST APIs (OBP) and less easy to read ISO20022 interfaces for compliance.

Hope that helps.

p.s. here is STET: https://www.stet.eu/assets/files/PSD2/API-DSP2-STET_V1.2.2.pdf

Answer 2

I've been looking for an answer to this question myself, hoping that I'll find a PSD2-compliant JSON-based answer, rather than have to figure out ISO20022.

I found this brilliant article by Starling Bank saying:

As of November 2017, however, the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) announced amendments to the scope of Open Banking to broaden out the Open Banking solution to include PSD2 items “in order to deliver a fully compliant PSD2 solution” – which can be read in full here and here.

It seems to me that if Open Banking is designed to be PSD2-compliant and it already delivers detailed specs, then the safest bet here is to simply implement Open Banking specs.

I've also found that viable alternatives to this are:

1. The Berlin Group's NextGenPSD2 specs, published as a YAML file.
2. The Stet specs, also published as a YAML file.

Answer 3

The specs rely a lot on JWTs I found this website very useful if it helps anyone - https://openbankingsdk.com

Answer 4

The text of PSD2 is here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32018R0389&from=DE

I found this from here: https://raue.com/en/e-commerce-2/new-eu-regulation-for-electronic-payments-and-online-banking/ which has a helpful summary.

PSD2 is the interface requirement, I don't understand why so many of the responses are about Open Banking, which is just about how to use the interface!

Answer 5

Here is the UK standard.

https://www.openbanking.org.uk

Also there is a linkedin group to connect developers working on PSD2 and Openbanking with banks, regulators and suppliers here.

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12069802

Answer 6

If you are looking for a technical standard that is intended to be applicable across all PSD2 countries, you should check out the Berlin Group spec.

The Open Banking spec is somewhat UK specific, it might be sufficient if you only need to support UK market, or you could extend it to support other products/markets (e.g. SEPA payments).