Open banking was one of the most important innovations of the new law "On payment services", approved in 2020.

Open banking should enable any individual or entity with a payment account to use it to perform payment services provided by other financial institutions.

Banks will be obliged to grant access with the approval of the account holder and only for the purpose of payment transactions. This concept is mainly related to two new services, payment service initiation and account information.

The law "On payment services" entered into force as early as January 2021, based on the main principles of the Second Directive of the European Union for PSD 2 payments, and aims to bring more competition to this market, creating more space for financial institutions of payments.

Services supported in open banking should be tested starting from January 1, 2024, as part of the regulation "On deep customer authentication and common, open and secure communication standards".

While from the middle of this year, open banking services should be active. In fact, such a thing did not happen, Monitor reported.

After great pressure from the Prime Minister and the Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, it was achieved in the middle of this year, the banks were ready to test open banking services with non-bank financial institutions, mainly those of electronic money (e-money). But, beyond testing, open banking services are not yet active and are not offered by any financial institution.

According to operators from the market, the reason is the delay in the licensing of e-money entities by the Bank of Albania for the provision of services related to open banking.

The Bank of Albania has admitted that this process has had delays, due to gaps related to the internal regulations of the entities and the standard contracts that must be concluded between them for these services. However, the sources state that these problems have been solved and within a few days the first two operators will be licensed for services based on open banking, Union Financiar Tirana and Easypay.

Further, only the final certification from the National Information Society Agency AKSHI will be needed to go live on the new services. For this last step, no obstacles are expected, since, in essence, the certificate is the same as the one previously given for testing.

Meanwhile, according to the Bank of Albania, at least seven of the commercial banks are ready to provide access to open banking. For other banks, there is an impasse of a technical nature, which is mainly related to the accepted certification for information security.