Security analysis of the open banking account and transaction API protocol

Open banking is one of the main transformational levers to improve competitiveness in retail banking by enabling client data sharing with third-party providers. This study enhances the traditional Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) constructs with two additional factors, initial trust and social influence, to understand clients’ behavioral intention to adopt open banking. The study analyzes a sample of 553 surveys in Spain, a country with an established open banking regulation (European Union’s Second Payment Services Directive). The proposed model showed robust explanatory capacity ( R2 = 85%). Results show that perceived usefulness, social influence, and initial trust are essential in determining the behavioral intention to embrace open banking. Nevertheless, perceived ease of use plays a minor role, an outcome aligned with current fintech adoption literature. Our study implies that private agents should focus on highlighting the benefits of open banking while policymakers should work on regulatory frameworks to increase clients’ initial confidence.

Open banking and digital financial inclusion: Early evidence

The article explores the legal foundations of the digital transformation of Ukraine’s national financial system in the context of European integration. It emphasizes that the modern financial system is undergoing profound qualitative changes under the influence of digital technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, fintech solutions, digital identification, and open banking. The implementation of such innovations creates new legal challenges that require a systematic update of the regulatory framework and its adaptation to the standards of the European Union. The author analyzes key national acts that constitute the legal basis for the digitalization of the financial sector, including the Law of Ukraine «On Payment Services,» «On Electronic Identification and Electronic Trust Services,» as well as strategic planning documents such as the Financial Sector Development Strategy until 2025. Special attention is paid to European documents: Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services (eIDAS), Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA), and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which determine the direction of reforms in digital regulation. The study finds that despite the existence of an initial legislative framework, digital financial regulation in Ukraine remains fragmented. Problematic areas include the legal status of virtual assets, tokenization, personal data protection, and cybersecurity. Insufficient interagency coordination and a lack of digital competencies among regulators are also noted. The article proposes a set of practical solutions aimed at improving legal regulation: aligning national legislation with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), clarifying provisions on virtual assets, introducing regulatory sandboxes, enhancing cooperation with European financial institutions, and implementing educational programs in the field of the digital economy. The findings may be used to shape the legal framework for Ukraine’s digital integration into the European financial space.

This paper describes the application of Real-Time Maude to the formal modeling, simulation, and model checking analysis of the NORM multicast protocol standard being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Because of its size and sophistication, real-time features, and the need to model and analyze subcomponents of NORM both in isolation and in combination, NORM poses a set of challenging problems for its formal specification and analysis. Our formal modeling and analysis efforts made us aware of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and cases of under-specification in the informal specification of NORM. Our work indicates that formal methods can successfully be applied by non-experts during the development of advanced Internet protocol standards.

In this paper we revisit the topic of dialogue grammars at the illocutionary force level and present a new approach to the formal modelling, evaluation and comparison of these models based on recursive transition networks. Through the use of appropriate tools such finite-state grammars can be formally analysed and validated against empirically collected corpora. To illustrate our approach we show: (a) the construction of human-human dialogue grammars on the basis of recently collected natural language dialogues in joint-task situations; and (b) the evaluation and comparison of these dialogue grammars using formal methods. This work provides a novel basis for developing and evaluating dialogue grammars as well as for engineering corpus-tailored dialogue managers which can be verified for adequacy.KeywordsDialogue SystemDialogue ModelDialogue ManagementDialogue StructureDialogue ParticipantThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In recent years, many firms have prioritized both pay equity (i.e., closing pay gaps associated with target groups such as women and racial minorities) and equitable representation (i.e., ensuring these target groups are fairly represented across a firm’s hierarchy). We use formal modeling and simulations to show how efforts to close pay gaps across multiple groups can undermine equitable representation. Specifically, our analysis suggests that pressure for pay equity creates a cost-based financial incentive to enact a subtle form of tokenism: A firm may minimize the cost of closing pay gaps if it maintains a workforce with a small number of minority women whom it pays well in order to compensate for underpaying larger numbers of majority women and minority men who resemble each other in terms of job attributes and personal qualifications. A firm can avoid these outcomes if it focuses on ensuring that employees from target groups are equitably rewarded for job attributes and personal qualifications rather than minimizing cost. But an equitable-rewards approach can be substantially more expensive than a cost-minimization approach, especially if pay gaps are larger in high-wage jobs or if there are many target groups. We conclude by offering testable empirical predictions and recommending a practical solution, namely to include terms for intersectional categories (e.g., minority women) in the regressions used to estimate pay gaps. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18306 .

FORMAL FAILURE MODELS

UK-based gambling policymakers have proposed affordability checks starting at monthly losses of £125. The present study combines open banking data with self-reports of the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) and other relevant information to explore the harm profiles of people who gamble at different levels of electronic gambling behaviour. This was a data fusion study in which participants consented to share their bank data via an open banking application programming interface (API) and who also completed relevant self-report items. Hierarchical hurdle models were used to predict being an at-risk gambler (PGSI > 0) and being a 'higher-risk' gambler (higher PGSI scores among those with non-zero scores) using four specifications of electronic gambling behaviour (net-spend, outgoing expenditure, incoming withdrawals, interaction model combining expenditure and withdrawals), and by adding self-reported data across two additional steps. The study took place in the United Kingdom. Participants were past-year people who gamble (n = 424), recruited via Prolific. Self-report measures were used of gambling-related harm (PGSI), depression [Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9)], age and gender; bank-recorded measures of income and electronic gambling behaviour. Unharmed gamblers had an average monthly gambling net-spend of £16.41, compared with £208.91 among highest-risk gamblers (PGSI ≥ 5). Being an at-risk gambler (PGSI > 0) was predicted significantly by all four types of gambling behaviour throughout all three steps [1.08 ≤ odds ratios (ORs) ≤ 2.92; Ps < 0.001), with only outgoing expenditure being significant in the interaction model (2.26 ≤ ORs ≤ 2.81; Ps < 0.001). Higher PHQ-9 scores also predicted at-risk gambling in steps 2-3 (1.09 ≤ ORs ≤ 1.10; Ps < 0.001), as did lower age (0.95 ≤ ORs ≤ 0.96; Ps < 0.001) and male gender identity in step 3 (2.51 ≤ ORs ≤ 2.95; Ps < 0.001). Being a higher-risk gambler was predicted significantly by gambling behaviour only in the expenditure-only (1.16 ≤ ORs ≤ 1.17; Ps ≤ 0.048) and withdrawal-only (1.08 ≤ ORs ≤ 1.09; Ps ≤ 0.004) models, and was not predicted by income (0.98 ≤ ORs ≤ 1.14; Ps ≥ 0.601), age (0.98 ≤ ORs ≤ 0.99; Ps ≥ 0.143) or male gender identity (1.07 ≤ ORs ≤ 1.15; Ps ≥ 0.472). The UK government's proposed affordability checks for gamblers should rarely affect people who are not experiencing gambling-related harm. At-risk gambling is predicted well by different types of gambling behaviour. Novel insights about gambling can be generated by fusing self-reported and objective data.

The European Commission (EC) is advancing the data economy through a series of regulatory reforms aimed at giving customers control of their data and fostering innovation in third-party contexts. While the costs of developing existing banking infrastructures and creating open application programming interfaces have largely fallen on banks, third-party service providers have benefitted from new revenue streams and increased customer relevance. As a result, banks risk disintermediation with some customer segments. The impending Financial Data Access (FiDA) regulation is set to expand these dynamics by extending the range of financial data made accessible for third parties. Simultaneously, the entry into force of the Electronic Identification Authentication and Trust Services 2.0 (eIDAS2) introduces a digital wallet that allows consumers and businesses to share their identity credentials in online customer journeys, offering banks the potential to engage more effectively in the data economy. The key question is whether the new reforms will encourage banks to seek opportunities beyond compliance; more so than with the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and open banking. This paper analyses the opportunities arising from FiDA, eIDAS2 and the Data Acts, providing strategic considerations for banks navigating the data economy. It emphasises that banks are ideally positioned to become data custodians by offering customers tools for the secure and reliable exchange of data-driven digital transactions across all sectors. Ultimately, this approach will unlock new value and enhance the relevance of banks in the data economy.

We present a formal OpenFlow-based network programming language (OF) including various flow rules, which can not only describe the behaviors of an individual switch, but also support to model a network of switches connected in the point-to-point topology. Besides, a topology-oriented operational semantics of the proposed language is explored to specify how the packet is processed and delivered in the OpenFlow-based networks. Based on the formal framework, we also propose an approach to detect potential security threats caused by the conflict of dynamic flow rules imposed by dynamic OpenFlow applications.

Many research works have been done on the formal modeling and correctness analysis of interorganizational processes. But the coupling measurement of interorganizational processes is neglected. The coupling situation represents the adaptability and flexibility of interorganizational processes to the changing market environment. And it is one of the most important factors in the agility analysis of interorganizational processes. This paper discusses the coupling measurement technique of interorganizational business processes based on Petri nets. The formal definition of collaborative mesh is proposed. And the coupling intensity is presented to evaluate the coupling degree between process tasks and the process structure. It is calculated based on the relation between the related elements of the task and the whole process structure. Furthermore, the importance level of each business partner in the interorganizational process is analyzed

This paper is concerned with the formal modelling and simulative analysis of an energy-efficient MAC protocol for gossip-based wireless sensor networks. This protocol is a variant of classical slotted Aloha in which the number of active TDMA slots is dynamically changed depending on the number of neighbours of a node. We provide a formal model of this protocol, and analyse energy consumption under the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) radio model. We propose an amendment of the distributed slotted Aloha protocol by a simple dynamic power assignment scheme, and show that this significantly reduces the energy consumption (30%) and speeds up the message transmission.

In May 2004 the European Union was enlarged by ten new member states, eight of these were countries from the former Communist bloc. Between May 2004 and May 2006 the citizens of so-called EU8 countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovak Republic and Slovenia) enjoyed full worker mobility in only three ‘old’ EU member states, the Republic of Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Following EU enlargement, migrant workers from EU8 countries as well as their dependants have been arriving in the United Kingdom. In December 2007 almost 800,000 workers from EU8 countries were registered on the government's worker registration scheme. This article is concerned with the transnational practices of migrants from EU8 countries who have arrived in the UK following EU enlargement, in particular with everyday transnational practices that involve the use of a variety of media. The experiences of transnational migrants involve connections between former and new (sometimes temporary) homelands. The role of media, in particular satellite television, has been studied in a transnational context. However, satellite broadcasting has not been embraced by migrants from EU8 countries to any extent, rather they rely on a range of media and practices that enable them to be connected to two or more national contexts. Migrants interviewed for this research have proved to be avid and highly skilled users of digital media in particular, they access newspapers, magazines and films online, use Skype to make calls, post photographs on social networking sites and even check online images of their home towns in Eastern Europe on a daily basis. The article explores the implications of these transnational practices in relation to migrants' identities and belonging as well as political participation. The data analyzed in the article was collected in in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 recently (post-May 2004) arrived migrants from EU8 countries in London, Edinburgh and Newcastle. The interviews were conducted in winter 2006 and summer 2007.

To cope with large data sets, distributed data stores partition their data across servers. However, real-world systems usually do not provide useful transactional semantics for operations accessing multiple partitions due to the delays involved in achieving multi-partition consistency. Read Atomic Multi-Partition (RAMP) transactions have recently been proposed as efficient light-weight multi-partition transactions that guarantee read atomicity: either all updates or no updates of a transaction are visible to other transactions. In this paper we formalize RAMP transactions in rewriting logic and perform model checking verification of key properties using the Maude tool. In particular, we develop detailed formal models---and formally analyze---a number of extensions and optimizations of RAMP that are only briefly mentioned by the RAMP developers.

A tool for verification of distributed systems defined using standard SDL-96 is described. The SDL description is automatically translated into a high-level Petri net model which is analyzed using the Maria reachability analyzer. Compared to manual design of a formal model for the system this saves a lot of time and greatly reduces the human mistakes in creating the model. The design process is also considerably more efficient because it is possible to check that the system is correct at a very early stage. Methods to reduce the complexity of the analysis both at the modeling and at the analysis level are discussed.KeywordsSDLreachability analysishigh-level Petri netsstate space explosion problem