What is a National Competent Authority?

NCAs, or National Competent Authorities, are regulatory or governmental bodies responsible for the supervision, registering and authorisation of financial service providers. They also publish registers for use by:

1. Qualified trust service providers, to make decisions on issuing certificates
2. Financial institutions, to check whether other parties are authorised.

Open Banking and PSD2 regulations require that participants in the open banking ecosystems, such as banks and Third-Party Providers be registered with an NCA. In particular, third-party providers must obtain a license from their country’s NCA before being allowed to access banks’ customer data.