Financial Data Exchange announces Open Finance Standards & FDX API Version 4.5

By Pavithra R

Financial Data Exchange, a nonprofit organization dedicated to unifying the financial industry has announced its Fall release which includes a myriad of technical standards and updates to the existing specification that has now been launched into the financial services marketplace.

The FDX release includes Version 4.5 of the FDX API, User Experience Guidelines 1.0, Foundational Requirements for Certification, FDX’s first user-permissioned data sharing Use Case (Personal Financial Management – PFM), an industry Taxonomy of Permissioned Data Sharing, Control Considerations, and adoption of Version 3.2 of the FDX Financial-Grade API Security Specification.

The components of the FDX Fall release include:

• FDX API v4.5: which includes new features that improve account number security via an optional use of tokenized data for payments and improves the data quality for use cases such as lending via expanded account holder information fields.
• User Experience (UX) Guidelines v1.0: which provides implementers with clear direction for designing permissioning processes for end-users to grant consent to access their financial data. The documentation describes the concepts of financial data sharing, data flow, and data clusters, followed by specific guidelines to ensure that the data sharing user experience will increasingly be a consistent, familiar, and friction-free process. 
• Personal Financial Management (PFM) Use Case: which provides end-users with access to data they need to manage their personal finances while ensuring data minimization so that only necessary data is shared. 
• Taxonomy of Permissioned Data Sharing: which aligns industry stakeholders and help regulators and policymakers better understand and define the various roles and perspectives within the user-permissioned financial data ecosystem. 
• FDX Financial-Grade API Security Specification v3.2: This Security Specification aims to provide specific implementation guidelines for online financial services to adopt by developing a REST/JSON data model protected by a highly secured OAuth profile.
• Control Considerations v3.2: A reference architecture addressing security, and fraud concerns in user-permissioned financial data exchange between financial institutions (data providers), data aggregators (data access platforms), and fintech applications and services (data recipients).
• Foundational Requirements v1.0: The document covers operational quality requirements that data providers must meet to apply for an FDX use case certification.

“FDX’s Fall release is another milestone and proof point of how FDX continues to deliver on its promise to unify the financial industry around secure, common, interoperable and royalty-free standards for user-permissioned data sharing and Open Finance,” said FDX Managing Director Don Cardinal.

Founded in 2018, The Financial Data Exchange was established on the idea that consumers and businesses should have easier, more secure access to their financial data.