Flinks Outbound is an Open Banking solution that enables secure, consent-based financial data sharing between financial institutions and third-party applications. It uses industry standards like Financial Data Exchange (FDX) to ensure consistent, high-quality data delivery.
What is Open Banking?
Open Banking is a framework that allows consumers to securely share their financial data with third-party service providers. Instead of screen-scraping or credential-based access, Open Banking uses standardized APIs and explicit user consent to share data directly from the financial institution.
How Flinks Outbound works
At a high level, the Outbound flow works as follows:
- Your application initiates an authorization request with a Data Provider (financial institution)
- The user is redirected to their financial institution’s consent page
- The user reviews and approves the data-sharing request
- The financial institution issues an authorization code
- Your application exchanges the code for an access token
- Your application uses the access token to retrieve financial data through FDX-compliant endpoints
This is an OAuth-based consent flow — the user’s credentials are never shared with your application. They authenticate directly with their financial institution.
Key concepts
Roles
| Role | Description |
|---|
| Data Provider | A financial institution (bank, credit union) that holds the customer’s financial data and provides it through APIs |
| Data Recipient | An organization that receives financial data from Data Providers to deliver services to the customer |
| Partner | A Data Recipient that is fully integrated into the Flinks Outbound ecosystem |
FDX-compliant output
Flinks Outbound returns data in FDX (Financial Data Exchange) format, an industry-standard JSON structure for financial data. This includes:
- Account details (type, balance, account number)
- Transaction history
- Customer information (name, contact details)
- Payment network information
Using a standard format means you can integrate with multiple Data Providers without custom parsing for each one.
When to use Outbound vs Connect
| Criteria | Outbound (Open Banking) | Connect (Screen-based) |
|---|
| Data access method | Direct API from financial institution | Credential-based extraction |
| User consent | OAuth consent at the financial institution | User enters credentials in Flinks Connect |
| Credential handling | Credentials never leave the bank | Credentials securely stored by Flinks |
| Institution coverage | Growing — depends on Data Provider availability | Broad — supports hundreds of institutions |
| Data freshness | Real-time via API | Near real-time with nightly refresh |
| Best for | Institutions that support Open Banking APIs | Broad institution coverage, legacy banks |
Outbound and Connect can be used together. Use Outbound for institutions that support Open Banking, and fall back to Connect for institutions that don’t yet have Open Banking APIs.
Getting started
- Receive client credentials from Flinks during onboarding (
client_id and client_secret)
- Register with Data Providers whose customers you want to serve
- Implement the OAuth authorization flow to obtain user consent
- Call FDX endpoints to retrieve financial data
For step-by-step instructions, see the Outbound API Getting Started guide.
