of Bank for International Settlements (BIS) started project apertaan initiative aimed at increasing open financial interoperability, reducing friction, and lowering costs in international finance.
The project focuses on connecting national open financial infrastructures in different jurisdictions and enabling secure encrypted data sharing via APIs.
It will initially focus on trade finance for small and medium-sized enterprises, covering products such as letters of credit, trade credit insurance, and supply chain finance, with more applications planned for the future.
Businesses currently face costly inefficiencies due to excessive manual paperwork and limited digital data portability.
Project Aperta aims to address this issue by prototyping a multilateral cross-border interoperability network. This allows licensed third-party providers such as banks and fintechs to securely exchange data across jurisdictions.
Approximately 70 jurisdictions regulate open finance, each adopting a different approach, including regulation-driven and market-driven systems.
These different standards impede the flow of data across borders.
Project Aperta seeks to overcome this problem by using proven, standardized APIs, promoting interoperability, and avoiding fragmentation of scope, standards, and solutions.
This prototype enables secure sharing of consumer and corporate data across borders.
This will facilitate faster account opening, reduce time and costs associated with international trade, and allow businesses to share data such as letters of credit and electronic bills of lading.
Project Aperta is a collaboration between the BIS Innovation Hub Hong Kong Centre, the central banks of the United Arab Emirates, Brazil and Hong Kong, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, the Global Corporate Identification Foundation, the International Chamber of Commerce Digital Standards Initiative, and the University of Hong Kong Standard Chartered Foundation. Tech Academy.
