Ninth Wave, the leading enabler of secure data connectivity between financial institutions and third-party applications including aggregators, fintechs, accounting solutions, tax prep software, and other consumer and business solutions, today announced that its flagship Ninth Wave Platform now supports Version 4.5 of the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) API.

As banks, aggregators, fintechs and other financial services firms continue their migration to tokenized authentication methods in permissioned data sharing, Ninth Wave is committed to providing its clients with support for cutting-edge industry standards, as well as other widely used legacy protocols. As part of this promise, the Ninth Wave Platform processes all versions of Open Financial Exchange (OFX), FDX, and other custom APIs, ensuring customers remain responsive and agile no matter which standard a third party may use. Additionally, Ninth Wave seamlessly bridges the connectivity gap for companies that have migrated to FDX, but still need to support products that require connectivity via OFX.

The recently released FDX API 4.5 includes new features that improve account number security via optional use of tokenized data for payments. These features also improve data quality for use cases such as lending, through expanded account holder information fields.

Other enhancements included in FDX API 4.5 and supported by the Ninth Wave Platform include:

  • User experience guidelines, which provide implementers with a clear direction for designing consistent, familiar, friction-free permissioning processes for end-users to grant consent to access their financial data.
  • A personal financial management (PFM) use case, offering end users access to the data they need through PFM apps and services, while ensuring that unnecessary data is not shared.
  • A taxonomy of permissioned data sharing, a set of common terminology to align industry stakeholders and help regulators and policy makers better understand the financial data ecosystem.
  • The FDX financial-grade API security specification v 3.2, a security specification adopted from the globally recognized FAPI v1 standard that provides specific implementation guidelines for online financial services to adopt by developing a REST/JSON data model protected by a highly secured OAuth profile.
  • Control considerations v 3.2, documentation that represents a reference architecture that addresses security, fraud, risk, and user experience concerns in data exchange between financial institutions, data aggregators, and fintech applications and services.
  • Foundational requirements v1.0, a document that covers operational quality requirements (availability, performance, and security) that data providers must meet to apply for FDX use case certification.

“While an increasing number of financial services firms rallies around the Financial Data Exchange consortium – of which Ninth Wave is a proud and active member – the OFX protocol continues to be used across the board with over 7,000 institutions deploying worldwide,” Ninth Wave Chief Technology Officer Jack Cassaro. “With often diverging migration paths across the financial services ecosystem, we built the Ninth Wave Platform to support the full range of data connectivity options, from legacy OFX versions, to OFX 2.2 that supports tokenization, right through to the newest FDX API Version 4.5.”

To learn more about the Ninth Wave Platform and how retail and commercial banks, credit unions, wealth and investment managers, and other financial services firms can leverage it, please visit ninth-wave.com.

About Ninth Wave
Leading financial institutions, including 3 of the top 5 U.S. banks and 8 of the top 10 wealth managers, rely on Ninth Wave to meet customer demand for transparent and secure access to their data. Using the Ninth Wave Platform, financial institutions empower their customers to securely manage their financial assets, transactions, and data from any application or software solution.

Serving as a single secure API gateway for all external data exchange, Ninth Wave enables financial institutions to step up their open finance initiatives while protecting customers’ data privacy, minimizing exposure to risk, and eliminating the need for legacy data-sharing methods. For more information, please visit ninth-wave.com.