• StepsDescription
• PSD2 in briefA quick overview of the PSD2 regulation and what it means.
• About our PSD2 APIsA summary of our PSD2 APIs and the standard we use for them.
• Lifecycle managementAn overview of our lifecycle management for our PSD2 APIs, including version handling.
• SCA MethodsThe SCA Methods and Handelsbanken Authentication Methods applicable to each country.
• Contingency mechanismHere you'll find the link to our contingency mechanism / fallback solution.
• PSD2 Performance StatisticsHere you'll find statistics comparing our APIs with our online channels.

The second EU Payment Services Directive (EU 2015/2366), PSD2, regulates payment services and payment service providers throughout the European Union and European Economic Area. The Directive's purpose is to increase competition and participation in the payments industry, strengthen consumer protection and clarify the rights and obligations for payment providers.

Amongst other things, it means that Third Party Providers (TPPs) must be allowed to access payment accounts, initiate payments and get confirmation of funds, on behalf of the customers, in their own infrastructure by using the banks' APIs. 

The main objectives of the regulation are:
• to increase competition
• have a more integrated and efficient European market for payments
• to improve and create the same conditions for all new and existing payment providers
• to increase security for online payments and access to accounts within the EU and EEA to strengthen consumer protection.

Read more about PSD2

Our APIs follow PSD2 regulations and in order to use them, you have to be an authorised TPP. You must be registered as either a Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP), an Account Information Service Provider (AISP) or a Card Based Payment Instrument Issuer (CBPII), authorised by the competent authority in your country.

We have modelled our API structure to the Berlin Group Technical Standard but made some deviations to better fit our markets. You can test the APIs in our Sandbox or by using a Postman environment, but first we recommend that you read the Technical Guidelines.

All PSD2 APIs have REST-endpoints and HTTP-verbs GET, POST and PUT are used. The endpoints will consume and respond with JSON-structures with UTF-8 encoding.

The PSD2 APIs have mandatory HTTP-headers. Please note that our APIs might also have additional specific headers.

Account Information API

Card Account Information API

Payment Initiation API 

Confirmation of Funds API

Our APIs have major and minor versions, a major version represents a breaking change in the API, such as removing a field in the JSON response of an endpoint or a major new feature of the API. A minor version represents a non-breaking change, such as adding a non-mandatory field. There is also a patch version used for documentation changes that shall not affect the service endpoint communication.

Versioning example:
Accounts Information API v1.1.0

The release of a new minor version of an API will override the implementation of the previous one (within the same major version). Example: when version 1.2.0 is released, 1.1.0 of that API will have the same implementation as the new one. The plan is to support two parallel major versions of an API in the Live environment; one current and one deprecated. When a new major version is released the previous deprecated one will be removed.

Strong customer authentication (SCA) is a requirement from the PSD2 regulations which ensures that customers can safely and securely access their account information and make payments via Third Party Providers (TPPs).

As we operate in multiple countries, please see below for which SCA Methods and Handelsbanken Authentication Methods are supported for each country.

Please visit the links below for more information about our contingency mechanisms for all the countries we support.

Fallback solution (SE, GB, NL, LU)

Fallback solution (Finland only)

Here you'll find statistics on how our API and online channels are performing on a daily basis. Statistics will be published the month after every quarter (i.e. data from October to December will be published in January).

Statistics