An open schema, and a company that arranges the access.
CommonSchema has two halves. The data model is open and lives at commonschema.org. The work of making it usable against real providers, region by region, is done by the company behind this site.
What lives on commonschema.org
The specification
Objects for accounts, balances, transactions, holdings, trades, statements, usage intervals and bills, and the consent envelope every record travels in.
Field definitions
Every field with its type, meaning, units and the rules for when it may be empty, so two implementations read a record the same way.
Provider mappings
How each source format maps onto the schema, field by field, including what is lost or approximated along the way.
Conformance fixtures
Example payloads and their expected output, so a mapping can be checked by anyone, not only by us.
What commonschema.com does
Regional arrangements
Each region has its own rules for who may receive consented data and how. We work through those arrangements region by region.
Access to providers
Holding or arranging the access each region needs, so builders connect through one API instead of negotiating market by market.
Consent and operations
Consent flows, revocation, audit trails, monitoring and support for the connections we run.
Why split them
A data model is more useful when it is shared: builders can read it, test against it and leave if they need to. Access is different. It depends on local rules and relationships that someone has to hold and operate, and that is the part we take on.