"Whether it’s meals in the day, Neapolitan ice cream, or a game of rock, paper, scissors – the best things in life come in threes. And while payment legislation may not spring to mind when we think of important trilogies, PSD3, the European Commission’s recently proposed update to the Payment Services Directive (PSD2), is a hotly anticipated update for those in the payments space."

“Last month, the European Banking Authority (EBA) published a response to the European Commission’s call for advice on the upcoming review of the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). The 490 items contained within the document include a number of proposals that deal with the issue of application programming interface (API) fragmentation. According to the EBA, “experience gained in the implementation of PSD2 has shown that the absence of a single API standard has led to the emergence of different API solutions across the EU.” The report further added: “This creates significant challenges for the TPP”. [third-party service providers] Because they have to make significant effort to connect with different ASPSP. [Account Servicing Payment Service Providers’] Adapting their connection to APIs and API’s changes over time. Cutting out all the jargon, the EBA argues that API standardization is needed to reduce barriers to entry for fintechs looking to access financial account data held by banks and similar institutions.”