JoPACC Launches the Jordan Open Finance Standards

In line with the “Open Finance Services Instructions” issued by the Central Bank of Jordan in 2022, and through its fintech Incubator JOIN Fincubator, the Jordan Payments and Clearing Company (JoPACC), in collaboration with a taskforce that includes the Central Bank of Jordan and a group of banks in Jordan has launched The Jordan Open Finance Standards. This one-of-a-kind initiative aims to develop unified requirements for the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for a range of the most important financial services in the banking sector. 

The Jordan Open Finance Standards aim to simplify and streamline the workflow models within the financial industry and help fintech startups integrate with other financial institutions using a unified set of APIs, alleviating the burden of using multiple APIs tailored to each financial institution’s requirements as they all vary in data models, structures, infrastructure and systems utilized.

 The standardization of the APIs contributes greatly to reducing the time and cost required for integrating services with entities, which expedites the launching of many innovative fintech solutions and banking products into the market, as a result of the unified standard that is developed and programmed once by financial institutions and fintech companies, and subsequently reused by all institutions according to the service to be launched. 

This initiative comprises framing these data models into four main financial services categories within the financial ecosystem under which 16 financial services are listed, where the taskforce is always working on enhancing and adding more service as per the market needs and requirements across all sectors falling under the supervision of the Central Bank of Jordan. These four categories consist of: Account Information Services (AIS), Extended Services (ES), Facilities, Products & Services (FPS), and Payment Initiation Service (PIS). 

It is worth mentioning that some of the services of the Jordan Open Finance Standards were designed using the Webhook mechanism facilitating automated real-time data transfer between web applications triggered by specific events.

The Jordan Open Finance Standards have been developed based on 8 main design principles to ensure constant growth and efficiency, aiming to elevate digital financial services in Jordan. Among the most important principles are Collaboration with the Market, Application of Global Standards to ensure data security and protection, and Customer Consent Management. 

JoPACC has also made this initiative’s documents freely and publicly accessible to anyone interested in benefiting from, reviewing, and conducting tests, by accessing the Digital Sandbox environment at the following link: JOF Digital SandBox.