The BIS Innovation Hub has published its Project Aperta report, a significant milestone for cross-border open finance and a meaningful validation of the open standards approach that the OpenID Foundation has long championed.

Project Aperta has been designing, developing, and testing a prototype for cross-border open finance interconnectivity through APIs - connecting the open finance networks of the UK, the UAE, Brazil, Hong Kong, and India. The project proves that secure, interoperable data sharing across borders is achievable within existing banking infrastructure, without rebuilding from scratch.

The OpenID Foundation's role

The OpenID Foundation contributed to Project Aperta as an observing member, with the Foundation’s Vice-Chair Dima Postnikov and Board Member Mark Verstege serving as liaisons to the project.

They joined an observer list spanning central banks, regulators, and international institutions, including the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Reserve Bank of India, Swift, the World Economic Forum, and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). The breadth of that observer community is a reflection of the significance Project Aperta holds for the global financial community.

Open standards at the core

Project Aperta adopts FAPI 2.0 as its underlying security profile. It was chosen specifically to leverage an industry accepted pattern already proven across multiple open finance deployments and to avoid custom security designs across jurisdictions. 

The report also grounds the project's trust framework in OpenID Federation principles and identifies it as the preferred architecture for the next phase of cross-border open finance interoperability.

Dima said: “FAPI 2.0 and OpenID Federation are already powering open finance ecosystems across multiple jurisdictions globally. Seeing them adopted at this level, in a BIS led initiative involving central banks and regulators from five continents, is a significant validation of the work the OpenID Foundation community has put into developing these standards. Project Aperta shows what becomes possible when proven open standards are applied to genuinely hard interoperability problems.”

What Project Aperta proves

Project Aperta demonstrates that secure cross-border data portability is feasible within the existing banking ecosystem, using SME banking and trade finance as concrete test cases. Its outputs, including architectural documents, trust and identity system designs, and reference code, have been made publicly available for the central banking community to build on.

Looking ahead, the report suggests that small groups of jurisdictions with mature open finance ecosystems could pilot further real-world use cases, building the operational, legal, and governance foundations needed for broader global adoption.

Gail Hodges, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation, said: “Project Aperta is exactly the kind of initiative the OpenID Foundation standards are designed to support. Our thanks to OIDF member, Raidiam, for their work on the trust services, security profile, and ecosystem integration, and to Ozone API for their work on the FAPI compliant reference implementations. We look forward to the next phase of this work on open data across borders, and other cutting edge applications of FAPI 2.0 and OpenID Federation." 

About the OpenID Foundation

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to helping people assert their identity wherever they choose. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts leading the creation of open identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy preserving. The Foundation’s OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. In the last five years, OAuth2 - the FAPI standard for interoperable, high security - has become the standard of choice for Open Banking and Open Data implementations, allowing people to access and share data across entities. Today, the OpenID Foundation’s standards are the connective tissue that enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling “networks of networks” to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.