The primary goal of PSD2 and Open Banking is to encourage greater innovation and competition in financial services. Governments - especially those in thrall to the European Union - are requiring account providers to provide open APIs that allow third-party providers or TPPs to enter the banking and payment ecosystem. At the same time, account providers must also obey a series of technical rules to ensure that their customers' data is secure and only accessible with the appropriate authorisation and consent.

To comply with these technical requirements, according to Forgerock, account providers must provide a facility for TPPs to test new services and applications before the next EU enforcement date of 14 September for regulatory technical standards. ForgeRock’s Sandbox-as-a-Service offers a way of doing this and the firm says that it can make it available in a matter of hours.

ForgeRock says that its so-called sandbox meets the relevant standard for testing Account Information Service Providers and Payment Initiation Service Providers . There is also a ForgeRock Open Banking Sandbox, which supports the key components that application developers require when testing consent, onboarding and access, including account and transaction API , payment initiation API and security profiles.