You have questions. I have answers! Episode IV.

Let's be honest, many of you are here for this.

I’ve spent the last few posts sharing stories from my decades-old past. But I also promised that I would deal with questions that are current, relevant, and difficult to answer.

A deal is a deal. Let’s talk about one. We’ll get to some others in our next installment.

I’m still learning the Substack editor, so in case you can’t see the screen shot, let’s do this:

BLedbetter asks: Whatever happened to PSD2?

Um, COVID-19, mostly. Oh, and politics. But I digress, as many of my North American friends may not have any idea what PSD2 is in the first place.

I’ll link to Wikipedia for a backgrounder, but here is the gist: PSD-2 is an Eurozone mandate that requiring any company working in the Fintech space to commit to meeting certain technology requirements.

There are two main parts. First is the mandate that companies offer API access to their systems openly and under RAND terms.

(If you don’t know much about APIs, we will talk about this more in a bit.)

Totally obvious, right?

No?

Ok, so have you ever used Mint? They ask you for your bank login info and aggregate it all in one place. They create that ability by literally taking your login information and pretending to be an everyday ordinary web user who logs into your financial institution’s web site with that information.

This isn’t the best idea ever, but it gets the job done. Everyone loves the idea of Mint, but everyone also agrees that giving a single company the user name and password to all of your financial institutions isn’t the best idea, either.

So, the nerds in Brussels came up with an idea. Instead of pretending to be you, the curious customer, institutions were required to offer up standard interfaces allowing software to inquire on your behalf the status of your accounts, etc. This already existed in the software world and was familiar to anybody writing software, but in terms of the banking industry, it was a game changer.

The nerds used the industry-standard name for these interfaces — APIs. They allow different pieces of software to find a “common ground” to collect information, perform actions, and generally work together to accomplish common tasks.

So, the EU mandated that anybody handling your money must create a way for you to interact with their systems freely and openly. All of the sudden, companies like Mint no longer had to pretend to be you using your iPad. Instead, they could use your existing information and force the institution to return the data in a neat & tidy format.

If you live in the Eurozone, this means that you have instant access to your financial data in a neat format regardless of who or what entity holds your funds.

Now, in terms of using your credit cards, PSD2 deals with that too…but that’s a different story. One that required me working my ASS off when I was at Delta.

And yes, the upper-case ASS means that there is a story attached. Another reason for Part 2—which is to come.