Bahrain's open banking API standards are updated, and the reliability improves

Bahrain's open banking API standards have been updated, and the most significant change is not in the functionality the APIs expose but in the reliability they require. The update specifies uptime, response time, and error-handling standards that the banks providing the APIs must meet, and the standards are the intervention that determines whether the open banking framework produces a market.

The experience of open banking globally is that the functionality of the APIs matters less than their reliability. A third-party provider that builds on an API needs the API to be available, fast, and consistent; an API that is functionally rich but operationally unreliable is an API that no provider can build a business on, because the provider's own service becomes unreliable as a consequence. The reliability is the foundation, and the foundation is what the update addresses.

The reason the reliability matters is that it is the precondition for the developer ecosystem that open banking is supposed to produce. A developer who can rely on the API will build on it; a developer who cannot will not, and the use cases that depend on the API will not be built. The update is, in effect, the intervention that makes the open banking framework usable by the people who are supposed to use it, and it is the intervention that the framework's success depends on.

The implication is that Bahrain is learning from the experience of the markets that launched open banking before it, and the learning is producing a better framework. The reliability standards are not glamorous, but they are the difference between an open banking framework that works and one that exists on paper. The update is a small technical change and a large strategic one, and it is the kind of change that the region's other open banking markets should make.