bankacl

Bankacl is an open-source authorization framework intended for banking and financial-technology software. It provides a policy-driven approach to access control across complex, multi-tenant banking environments, enabling consistent permissions for people, services, and APIs. Bankacl supports both role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC), allowing administrators to express permissions in terms of roles, attributes, and contextual factors such as time, location, or transaction risk.

Its architecture centers on a policy decision point (PDP) and policy enforcement point (PEP) connected to an attribute store. Administrators define policies in a human-readable language that can express resource-scoped permissions for accounts, transactions, data exports, and administrative actions. Bankacl also includes a policy simulation mode for testing decisions and a comprehensive audit trail of access events.

Bankacl offers connectors for identity providers (LDAP/Active Directory, SSO), token-based authentication (OAuth2/JWT), and REST APIs. It is designed for multi-tenant deployments and emphasizes pluggable storage for policies and attributes. The framework includes security hardening defaults and guidance to align with common banking regulatory requirements, such as data segregation and access auditing.

Development and governance: Bankacl is maintained by an open-source community of contributors and is distributed under a permissive license. Adoption in pilot projects among banks and fintechs has highlighted its modularity and interoperability, while practitioners caution that correct policy design and performance tuning are essential for production use.