Introduction

Open banking is a concept that lets third-party financial service providers access customer’s financial data and services with their consent. Consent management is the process of prompting, collecting, and managing bank customer’s consent before a third-party provider collects or shares the customer's financial information.

In an open banking ecosystem, once a bank customer requests a service via an API consumer application for the first time to access the customer's data, the customer needs to authorize and grant consent. These consents go through a phased lifecycle as follows:

lifecycle of a consent

For more information on consent management lifecycle, see the Consent Management section in Open Banking Requirements.

How to manage consents

The API consumer applications seek consent from their customers who wish to expose their financial data through the application. When granting consent the customers must know the following:

  • Who they are granting access to: The identity of the API consumer application
  • For what purpose: The details that this application will have access to. For example, account details, payment details
  • For what period: Number of days the consent is valid for
  • Expiration process: How the user can revoke a granted consent

Once the customer successfully agrees to the above the bank backends take over the process. The bank backend engages with the customer and authenticates them according to the available security mechanisms, for example, multi-factor authentication/Strong Customer Authentication via SMS OTP.

After successful authentication, the customer is presented with the details of the consent where they can allow or deny this request from the API consumer application to access data. Depending on the customer’s response the API consumer application may or may not have access to the data.

With the Consent Manager application in WSO2 Open Banking Accelerator you can use one of the following methods to revoke these consents granted to API consumer applications.

  • A customer can revoke a consent using the Consent Manager portal
  • A Customer Care Representative from the bank can revoke a consent on behalf of a user

WSO2 Open Banking Accelerator uses the following API endpoints to manage consents as previously described.

  • Consent Validation - /validate endpoint
    The accelerator gathers all consent details and invokes validators via this API. Once the validations are performed, the flow will proceed. You can write your own validators and customize the process.

  • Consent Portal - /admin endpoint
    The Consent Management portal and the Customer Care portal invoke this API to search consents and revoke consents.

  • Consent Management - /manage endpoint
    This component processes requests based on specification requirements. The requests are routed here and a handler processes them. You can make changes to HTTPServletResponse using the same handler.

  • Consent Authorize - /authorize endpoint
    This endpoint can retrieve and persist consents. You can add your own steps to retrieve or persist.

For more information on this, refer to Consent Management Extensions.

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