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Overview

Introduction

Open Banking Connector is a fully free-to-use, open-source UK Open Banking client (connection layer) that simplifies connections to UK Open Banking APIs.

It is self-deployed (runs as a component in your backend infrastructure) and released via a Docker image built entirely from the public source code. Because it runs locally, it has great performance (including low latency) as well as privacy/security benefits because bank data is not passed through another organisation. And fully-transparent source code allows you to see what the code is doing and even build it yourself using the included Dockerfile.

It provides internal HTTP APIs based on the UK Open Banking APIs but with two major simplifications:

  1. bank profiles allow Open Banking Connector to support differing bank implementations and behaviours including non-uniform spec versions and quirks/unexpected API behaviours. This means you see a single, unified multi-bank API with these issues taken care of saving the considerable effort required for individual bank integrations. (Note: we do not however adjust or normalise bank data itself in order to preserve maximum processing flexibility.)
  2. security profile (auth) concerns including access token acquisition and management are taken care of transparently (invisibly) isolating these from the rest of your backend and saving you the effort of implementing these.

It is designed for use in the cloud and is ideally suited for deployment in a Kubernetes cluster.

Uses

Open Banking Connector can be used:

  • as a connectivity layer enabling your Open Banking application to connect to UK bank APIs
  • as a tool for creating and managing bank registrations (OAuth2 clients) for use by your own or other software

The Open Banking Connector repo also contains a .NET project for bank tests. This is used in the development of Open Banking Connector as a regression test suite. Please contact us if you are interested in using this.

Requirements

To access UK Open Banking APIs, you will need to have an appropriate authorisation/registration with the FCA which gives you access to the UK Open Banking directory. To use bank sandboxes, you simply need to register with OBIE to use the UK Open Banking directory sandbox.

Open Banking Connector needs to be hosted in your back-end and requires access to a database and configuration. Please see infrastructure requirements for more information.

Philosophy and business model

Open Banking Connector was conceived following difficulties encountered when integrating with different bank APIs. It seemed pointless that everyone should have the burden of individually integrating with each bank - why couldn't we build an open-source solution instead?

From its beginnings in 2019, multiple companies have funded the development of this project. It is fully free to use.

We welcome new users who we hope will also invest in the project!

Users can fund new features and bank integrations either by direct code contributions (please contact us) or by contracting us (Finnovation Labs) to do the work.

For those using Open Banking Connector in production, we offer (and highly recommend) our support and maintenance product. This offering includes a monthly online catch-up (if desired), detailed release emails, and advice on such topics as initial setup, API breaking changes and database migrations.

We also offer a sponsorship programme for those wishing to further support Open Banking Connector.