PRESS RELEASE
Decisions by the Supervisory Council, 1 June 2022

In the meeting on 1 June 2022, the Supervisory Council of the Bank of Albania reviewed and decided to:

1. Approve the Regulation “On strong customer authentication and common and secure open standards of communication”.

This legal act aims at regulating in a detailed manner the requirements of the regulatory authority on the strong customer authentication and its implementation by the entities subject to this by-law.

The drafting of this Regulation ensures the meeting of the obligations for the further approximation with the European Union practices in the framework of membership process, and provides the possibility to the payment service providers and their customers to use the same services and standards which are established by the payment service providers in the EU countries, before the finalisation of the membership process.

Strong customer authentication is one of the requirements laid down in the EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2)[1], transposed in the Law 55/2020 “On payment services” which aims at enhancing security and minimising the risk in case fraudulent attacks in the field of the electronic payments. This important process, defined in the special law on payment services, is based on the use of two or more elements, categorised as: (i) knowledge; (ii) possession; and (iii) inherence. These elements are independent, thus providing for the breach of one element does not compromise the reliability of the others and, and protect the confidentiality of the authentication data of the customer.

The Supervisory Council was also informed on other daily functional and operational activities of the Bank of Albania.