Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)

TCS states that the customer is the data subject and the owner of the data, while the bank is the custodian of the data captured in order to validate the customer and provide banking services.

TCS BaNCS is an on-line, real time banking solution which exposes services at the granularity of business functions as APIs by design, these are either RESTful, SOAP over HTTPS or TCP/IP. The APIs are aligned to industry standards such as IFX, BIAN and open banking/ PSD2 wherever possible, and in areas where these standards are deficient TCS BaNCS has proprietary APIs defined.

APIs to view and/or modify customer’s data are provided, these APIs can be accessed by various channels like internet/mobile banking (by the individual) or branch channel/CRM application (by a teller on behalf of the customer). The capability to extract/download all customer data in a machine-readable format (XML/JSON) for data portability or in the form of a report (PDF) are available.

TCS BaNCS provides capability around the “right to be forgotten” as well, as part of this feature customer PII can be anonymized or purged (configuration driven) from the application.

TCS is in the process of writing to OFX standard and progressively monitoring progress of FDX. 

TCS states that there are multiple systems that form the ecosystem for open APIs where customer authorized data aggregators access customer’s data. These include (but are not limited to):

• Third party provider: the external aggregator trying to access the data on customers behalf.
• Registration authority: an external body that maintains the authorized list of Third Party Providers (TPP) (optional entity).
•  API Gateway: a gateway exposing banks’ APIs to the outside world in a secure manner.
• Consent Management System: the system maintaining records of consents provided by the customer on a specific account to a specific TPP for a specific purpose/scope for a specific period/duration.
• Core banking system: the system of records of customer data

In the above list, while (a) and (b) are external to the bank, (c), (d) and (e) form part of bank’s IT landscape.

TCS BaNCS has an established reference architecture where all the above systems come together to form the ecosystem that provides the open banking capabilities to the bank. This includes, but is not limited to, framework for secure access to customers data based on roles, purposes and implementing dynamic data masking for configure sensitive attributes.

In addition to TCS BaNCS Global Banking Platform, TCS provides
optional offerings like:

• TCS Consent Management System.
• Ability to implement any of the industry standard API gateways like IBM APIConnect, Google APIGEE, etc.

The bank can opt for these products and services to build the open banking capabilities for its enterprise.

The bank may also opt for its own choice of enterprise-level API Gateway and Consent Management System. In such a scenario, TCS BaNCS Banking Platform can be integrated with ease in the bank’s IT landscape, leveraging the rich set of APIs provided by the suite.

All of these business services as APIs are available through the SaaS model.

(Including Exclusivity, Coterminous Contracts, Deconversion Fees, Limitation of Liability, SLAs and Early Termination Penalties)

TCS states the following:

• TCS operates an open third-party ecosystem without exclusive arrangements.
• TCS can provide coterminous contracts for products and services owned and offered by TCS.
• There are no deconversion fees per se, however, complex support requirements may require professional services support.
• Limitation of Liability is generally limited to a portion of fees paid or fixed amount.
• In a cloud environment, TCS can offer 99% to 99.9% availability for TCS-provided services.
• Generally, TCS requires full payment of the initial contract term. Discounted termination in a renewal or latter stages of the initial term depend on the client situation and contract terms as a whole.