By Iustinian Captariu, Theodora Stoica
Following the adoption of EU Directive (EU) 2015/2366 of the European Parliament and Council of 25 November 2015 on payment services in the internal market (“PSD2”), the Romanian Competition Council (the “RCC”) launched in 2016 a comprehensive study of the Romanian retail banking market.
PSD2 is expected to fundamentally change the way payment and account information accessing operations are performed by eliminating the monopoly that banks currently hold over their customers’ banking data. PSD2 allows third-party payment service providers (“TPPs”), such as fintech companies, to enter the market. For this to happen, banks must ensure TPP access to their payment infrastructure and client data through application programming interfaces (“APIs”) for the latter to eventually develop information and payment services as well as other financial services targeting banking customers.
