18 European organisations participate in the NextGenPSD2 Implementation Support Programme (NISP), which aims to support banks and interbank processors in implementing the Berlin Group NextGenPSD2 Framework.

An important NISP component is a common Testing Framework deliverable, simplifying interoperability testing, rendering maintenance efficiencies and also taking care of the different variants and options that might arise in implementation. The common Testing Framework is expected to deliver an enormous help to the whole industry, due to the subsequent reduction in actual testing efforts for both banks and Third Party Providers (TPPs), while aiming to support and ease the efforts of national supervisors and the European Banking Authority (EBA) in evaluating the API implementations on time. This will contribute to a fast-growing and mature market of NextGenPSD2 access to account services, available for the benefit of European consumers and businesses alike.

The NextGenPSD2 Implementation Support Programme will also support implementers in complying with all relevant European regulatory and organisational requirements until March 2019, when banks have to offer testing facilities to TPPs, 6 months before the EBA Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) come into force, thus avoiding the implementation of a ‘fall-back’ interface solution. Such a common implementation support also helps to optimise implementations, maximise implementation quality levels, while solving interoperability issues and developer questions.

Due to being one of the outstanding and open pan-European standards enabling TPPs to access bank accounts under the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), the Berlin Group NextGenPSD2 Framework is offering an open, common and harmonised European API (Application Programming Interface) standard currently being implemented across numerous markets throughout Europe. Based on PSD2 and EBA RTS, the NextGenPSD2 Framework v1.1 was published in May 2018. It integrates the results of convergence discussions with other API standardisation initiatives and allows interested market participants to start implementing the PSD2 required account information (AIS), payment issuer instrument (PIIS) and payment initiation (PIS) services into a common, interoperable and harmonised interface and infrastructure. Since then, several markets in Europe have started implementing the NextGenPSD2 Framework.

Publication of the NextGenPSD2 Implementation Support Programme was introduced to the market via a press release. The full text of the press release can be found here.