Hi everyone - to explain a bit more about the differences in ‘standards’.
In the UK, all the largest banks were mandated to work together to agree some interface standards to make Open Banking work. These standards exist today and are managed by a central organisation called the Open Banking Implementation Entity (see here: https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/)
All the big banks must follow these standards - under UK regulations. However, smaller banks are not obligated to follow these exact standards. In the UK, nearly all the smaller banks have still adopted these standards - which is great for companies like Snoop as we have one (relatively!) consistent approach. Even with standards, we do have differences between some banks.
Amex is obviously a predominantly US bank that operate globally. So although they have the same obligations to provide some sort of technical interface, they were not obliged to adopt the UK standard above, and chose not to.
Starling are a slightly different case. Although they were also not obliged to use the new standard, they were were already well ahead of the curve and had previously developed their own interfaces to allow apps like Snoop to connect. As they already had solutions in place (and were not mandated to adopt the new standard), they decided to stick with what they had.
The standards cover all sorts of things - such as how the ‘consent’ journey works (when you give your permission to share your account), what data items we get, how error handling works, what security protocols are used etc.
For Amex, pretty much all of this is different to the UK standard. Starling is not so very different, but still requires custom development to make it work.
Amex and Starling customers don’t need to be concerned about this - the interfaces are still secure and robust. It just means more work for us to support different methods.
I hope that’s useful @0weavern and @hawkzzter
Paul