Bespin Global expands open banking offerings via partnership

Bespin Global, an international cloud management and consulting firm for banks, is seeking to help U.S. banks build their open banking tech stack through a partnership with London-based Ozone API.

The move comes as U.S. banks work to implement the open banking rule that was finalized by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year. The rule aims to enable consumers to better control their financial data, although President Donald Trump’s efforts to shut down the CFPB leaves questions about how the rule would be enforced.

The recently announced partnership will create an “end-to-end” tech integration that Bespin Global’s bank clients can use for open banking. Steven Zeller, head of product strategy for Bespin Global US, told American Banker that Bespin Global provides more of the front-end requirements while Ozone API would offer back-end integrations with its application programming interface.

“If a bank really doesn’t even know where to start or know what the ins and outs of the Financial Data Exchange compliance requirements are, that’s the front end — education, expertise and consulting,” Zeller said. “What we do with companies in a lot of different industries is help them pick a data platform, aggregate all their siloed data, get it on that platform, and help them analyze it and examine it.”

The data compiling is a prerequisite to the next step where banks start integrating with an API provider like Ozone, Zeller said. “At the end of the day, our customers have access to their data and all of these compatible open-finance products.”

Bespin Global is not exclusively partnering with Ozone, and according to Zeller the firm is also planning to work with other aggregators.

“I think it would be kind of foolhardy in this industry to have any kind of exclusivity, because the entire purpose of it is that eventually everything’s going to talk to these big aggregators,” he said. “We see ourselves partnering with some of the big boys like Plaid and MX and Finicity.”

The current challenge for banks is figuring out how to prepare their data internally and how to get that data out to a larger network while being compliant with regulations, Zeller said. According to him, the Bespin-Ozone collaboration will be able to help banks with that challenge.

Both Bespin Global and Ozone API have international footprints, but the partnership is currently focused on the U.S. open banking market.

“Bespin is in Asia, the Middle East and the U.S., so we are certainly piloting this here,” Zeller said. “Bespin Global U.S. is its own corporation, and everything we’re doing with Ozone is specific to the U.S. for now.”

Open banking integrations for banks in European markets have been standard for years, due in part to the work of Ozone API.

“Our entry into North America is relatively recent,” Eyal Sivan, general manager of North America for Ozone API, told American Banker. “I joined the firm at the beginning of last year to really expand our success into the North American market as Canada and the U.S. roll out their own open-banking regulation.”

In order for open banking to be successfully implemented in the U.S. market, Sivan said common requirements such as the FDX standard are needed.

“I firmly believe the key to open banking is this idea of common, open, shared standards, and that is something that is relatively new,” he said. “In the U.S. you’ve seen that begin as well in the form of the Financial Data Exchange (FDX), which was started in 2016 to create a common open standard for the financial services industry but in a way that’s uniquely American. Today FDX is hovering at around 200 members, are on version 6.3 of their specification, and continue to grow.” FDX’s API supported 94 million consumer accounts for permissioned data sharing as of September 2024.

When the CFPB finalized its open-banking rule, specifically Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the regulation “met market activity that was already taking place,” Sivan said. “That’s great, because for open banking to work you need a little bit of market and a little bit of regulation and the two have to compliment each other. How that works and how they complement each other is unique from one region to another.”

In a way, the concepts behind open banking have already existed in the U.S. bank ecosystem through connected banking and screen-scraping. Screen-scraping, an older method of data collection, is insecure and should be replaced by bidirectional API providers, according to CCG Catalyst senior research analyst Tyler Brown.

“I think it’s important for financial institutions to understand the value of API access in the first place,” Brown told American Banker. “It requires some sort of implementation either on their part or in partnership with the vendor. That’s going to be more secure than screen-scraping and it’s going to avoid the cat-and-mouse game of the aggregators updating their software constantly as there are changes to the website and it breaks, and then the aggregator wants to tunnel back into digital banking and pull something for their customers.”

Brown said there are three components to open banking.

“There’s the philosophy, there’s policy, and then there’s the technical aspect,” he said. “The combination of those three things depends on the market you’re in. In the United States, you might say there has been the philosophy and the technology for some time now, driven by the industry with aggregators. And then the policy solution was the CFPB 1033 rule.”

Brown believes that open banking should be viewed by U.S. financial firms as “a competitive opportunity rather than a compliance obligation.”

“If we see Section 1033 actually in place with the compliance deadlines that were included in the rule, it becomes less of a competitive advantage and more of a competitive requirement, setting aside the actual compliance obligation,” he said. “If everybody has an open banking API, then if you don’t have one, you’re behind the market.”

Bespin Global and Ozone API started a free Open Banking Workshop for qualifying banks in February. The partnership will be featured at the upcoming FDX Conference in April, according to a press release.

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