The practice of banks opening access to account data and payment initiation to licensed third parties, with the customer's explicit consent, through secure APIs.
In the EU it is mandated by PSD2: banks must give authorised providers access to payment accounts. Switzerland took a different route. There is no equivalent legal obligation, and access is market-led, developed through bLink, the SIX platform through which Swiss banks expose standardised interfaces to software providers.
For a fiduciary, the practical consequence is that bank data can flow automatically into accounting software instead of being downloaded and imported by hand.
