Regions Bank Taps Axway to Provide Open Banking Services

Regions Bank says it has launched a partnership with data integration firm Axway.

The collaboration, announced Monday (Jan. 6), will see Regions offer Axway’s Amplify Open Banking solution to its consumer banking, corporate banking and wealth management clients.

“As customers continue to grant access to their financial data to third party applications, this new solution will help capture customer consent, remove the need for credential sharing to third parties, and provide another layer of security to protect customer data,” Tim Mills, emerging and digital payments group manager at Regions Bank, said in a news release.

“Open banking is the future, and we are pleased to work with Axway to make banking easy for customers who turn to Regions time and again for their banking needs.”

The release notes that the bank’s customers now have the ability to authorize third parties to access their financial data via a credential-based process known as “screen scraping.”

In the future, the Amplify solution will offer a faster, simpler and more secure pathway through an application programming interface (API) solution, though consumer and wealth management clients will still be allowed to share financial data with third parties if they want.

“Instead of the third-party platform saving the banking credentials to use every time a transaction is made, Regions will authorize consent to share account information only after individual transactions are approved by the client,” the company said.

“This new process will remove the need for third-party platforms to save their banking credentials on their own systems.”

The partnership comes amid an “exciting time” for open banking and pay by bank, as Trustly Chief Product Officer Adam D’arcy put it in a recent conversation with PYMNTS.

As that report noted, the rise of pay by bank will reshape the relationships between banks, FinTechs and merchants. While bigger banks may find the cost of compliance manageable, smaller institutions could face hurdles. Collaboration with third-party providers will be critical to navigate these obstacles and capture new opportunities. D’arcy told PYMNTS he is optimistic about the potential for industrywide cooperation.

“We’re already seeing successful applications of open banking,” he said, adding that merchant adoption and strategic partnerships will be critical for pay by bank to succeed.

“You can’t just plug us in and expect it to work,” said D’arcy.

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