An Authority is a participant within an ecosystem that is responsible for accrediting and assigning Authorisation Domains and Authorisation Domain Roles to participants.

An Authority may be the ecosystem administrating organisation itself or an ecosystem administrator may simply be reflecting the information and roles issued by an external authority into the Connect platform.

Each authority is associated with a single country however the same authority can be added multiple times across national boundaries if required.

Each Authority is associated with one or more Authorisation Domain which enables roles to be assigned to participants that ultimately flow from an Authorities authorisation to grant and manage those roles.

It is possible for multiple authorities to be associated to the same Authorisation Domain which may be required when participants require authorisation from multiple sources in order to perform a desired function. For example, a Payments Initiation Service Provider in the UK may be authorised for the 'Open Banking' Authorisation Domain and 'PISP' Authorisation Domain Role by the 'UK FCA' Authority however they may also be authorised in the 'Open Banking' Authorisation Domain and the 'Confirmation of Payee (COP)' role by the 'UK Pay.UK' Authority.

This flexibility allows ecosystem administrators to accurately reflect the authorisation information for participants so participants within the ecosystem have available the information on the ultimate Authorising institution for a given Authorisation Domain and Role