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Category: Open Banking

Vyne raises UK’s largest, open banking seed round of $15.5M with its full-stack payments solution for merchants and consumers

by Polina Stavrovski
This post is by Polina Stavrovski from Seedcamp

We have been bullish on the potential for open banking and the power of tech to radically improve financial services for over a decade. In November 2019, we met Karl, Damien,  and Adam and were hugely impressed by their sector expertise and vision to drastically improve payment solutions for merchants and consumers, resulting in us leading their pre-seed round in November 2019. Fast forward under two years and we are excited to see the impressive growth, both in terms of major customers now using Vyne for their payments solutions, as well as this round – the UK’s largest open banking seed round – attracting the likes of  Hearst Ventures, Entrée Capital, TriplepointVenrex, Founder Collective and Partech alongside angel investment from Alex Chesterman, founder of Zoopla and CEO of Cazoo, Charlie Dellingpole, CEO and founder of ComplyAdvantage, and Will Neale founder of Grabyo. 

Vyne’s solution enables both merchants and consumers to have more direct, secure, and faster payments. By transforming the checkout experience, payments can be completed by consumers through their own banking app and merchants can engage customers through more digital channels such as through QR codes and pay-by-link, which can be sent by email, SMS or in person. Vyne has already completed some considerable use cases such as collaborating with Kinetic, to allow two million students to pay their rent in three clicks, as well as integrating with RemitOne, the leading technology and business services firm for the remittance world. “As leading payments experts, Vyne are the (Read more...)

Yapily raises $51 million for its open banking API by focusing on infrastructure

by Romain Dillet

Fintech startup Yapily has raised a $51 million Series B funding round led by Sapphire Ventures. The company has been working on a single, unified open banking API for several European markets. Developers can leverage that programming interface to interact with third-party bank accounts directly from their own products.

“The core difference between us and most of the players in the space is our focus on the infrastructure,” founder and CEO Stefano Vaccino told me. Unlike Tink or TrueLayer, Yapily operates in the background. You never see a Yapily logo anywhere and the company provides no front-end interface.

Another difference is that Yapily focuses exclusively on API integrations. Due to recent regulatory changes in Europe (PSD2), banks now have to offer official APIs to integrate with third-party services. While some still don’t offer APIs, many of them are now complying with the rules.

By focusing on official APIs, Yapily can offer a snappier and more reliable experience. Other startups working on unified open banking APIs rely on a mix of official APIs, screen scraping and private APIs. Screen scraping can be particularly slow and private APIs sometimes stop working overnight.

When it comes to coverage, Yapily supports more than 1,500 banks across eight different countries. “We have between 90 and 99% coverage in the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands,” Vaccino said. You can see the full list of banks on this page. According to Vaccino, only Tink has a similar level of coverage (Read more...)

Yapily raises $51 million for its open banking API by focusing on infrastructure

by Romain Dillet

Fintech startup Yapily has raised a $51 million Series B funding round led by Sapphire Ventures. The company has been working on a single, unified open banking API for several European markets. Developers can leverage that programming interface to interact with third-party bank accounts directly from their own products.

“The core difference between us and most of the players in the space is our focus on the infrastructure,” founder and CEO Stefano Vaccino told me. Unlike Tink or TrueLayer, Yapily operates in the background. You never see a Yapily logo anywhere and the company provides no front-end interface.

Another difference is that Yapily focuses exclusively on API integrations. Due to recent regulatory changes in Europe (PSD2), banks now have to offer official APIs to integrate with third-party services. While some still don’t offer APIs, many of them are now complying with the rules.

By focusing on official APIs, Yapily can offer a snappier and more reliable experience. Other startups working on unified open banking APIs rely on a mix of official APIs, screen scraping and private APIs. Screen scraping can be particularly slow and private APIs sometimes stop working overnight.

When it comes to coverage, Yapily supports more than 1,500 banks across eight different countries. “We have between 90 and 99% coverage in the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands,” Vaccino said. You can see the full list of banks on this page. According to Vaccino, only Tink has a similar level of coverage (Read more...)

Visa to acquire open banking platform Tink for more than $2 billion

by Romain Dillet

Visa has announced plans to acquire Tink for €1.8 billion, or $2.15 billion at today’s exchange rate. Tink has been a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interface (API).

Today’s move comes a few months after Visa abandoned its acquisition of Plaid, another popular open banking startup. Originally, Visa planned to spend $5.3 billion to acquire the American startup. But the company had to call off the acquisition after running into a regulatory wall.

Tink offers a single API so that customers can connect to bank accounts from their own apps and services. For instance, you can leverage Tink’s API to access account statements, initiate payments, fetch banking information and refresh this data regularly.

While banks and financial institutions now all have to offer open banking interfaces due to EU’s Payment Services Directive PSD2, there’s no single standard. Tink integrates with 3,400 banks and financial institutions.

App developers can use the same API call to interact with bank accounts across various financial institutions. As you may have guessed, it greatly simplifies the adoption of open banking features.

300 banks and fintech startups use Tink’s API to access third-party bank information — clients include PayPal, BNP Paribas, American Express and Lydia. Overall, Tink covers 250 million bank customers across Europe.

Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Tink operations should continue as usual after the acquisition. Visa plans to retain the brand and management team.

According to Crunchbase data, Tink has raised over $300 million from (Read more...)

Airbank centralizes all your business bank accounts and financial data

by Romain Dillet

Meet Airbank, a startup that is taking advantage of open banking regulation and related APIs to aggregate all your bank accounts. Focused on startups and small and medium companies, the company wants to build an all-in-one banking interface to access financial data, initiate payments, manage cash flow and more.

Airbank just raised a $3 million (€2.5 million) seed round led by Pia d'Iribarne and Jean de la Rochebrochard at New Wave, with Speedinvest and Tiny VC also participating. A handful of business angels are also joining the round, such as Cris Conde (Executive in Residence at Accel), Luca Ascani (Accel scout) and Marc McCabe (Sequoia scout).

The startup’s value proposition is quite simple and can be easily explained in one screenshot. With Airbank, you can enter your login information for all the bank accounts and related accounts that you use. After that, you can view everything from your Airbank account:

Image Credits: Airbank

Many companies have to deal with multiple bank accounts for several reasons — you may have opened one bank account when you incorporated your company, another bank account to request a loan, a Wise Business account for low foreign transaction fees, a Revolut Business account to get debit cards for everyone, etc.

In addition to bank accounts, chances are you’re also generating revenue with Stripe, PayPal or Shopify. Many executives lose a ton of time connecting to web portals, exporting data as CSV files, importing those files in Microsoft Excel and consolidating all that information.

(Read more...)

Belvo, LatAm’s answer to Plaid, raises $43M to scale its API for financial services

by Mary Ann Azevedo

Belvo, a Latin American startup which has built an open finance API platform, announced today it has raised $43 million in a Series A round of funding.

A mix of Silicon Valley and Latin American-based VC firms and angels participated in the financing including Future Positive, Kibo Ventures, FJ Labs, Kaszek, MAYA Capital, Venture Friends, Rappi co-founder and president Sebastián Mejía (Rappi), Harsh Sinha, CTO of Wise (formerly Transferwise) and Nubank CEO and founder David Vélez.

Citing Crunchbase data, Belvo believes the round represents the largest series A ever raised by a Latin American fintech. In May 2020, Belvo raised a $10 million seed round co-led by Silicon Valley’s Founders Fund and Argentina’s Kaszek.

Belvo scores $10M from Founders Fund and Kaszek to scale its API for financial services

Belvo aims to work with leading fintechs in Latin America, spanning across verticals like the neobanks, credit providers and personal finance products Latin Americans use every day.

The startup’s goal with its developer-first API platform that can be used to access and interpret end-user financial data is to build better, more efficient and more inclusive financial products in Latin America. Developers of popular neobank apps, credit providers and personal finance tools use Belvo’s API to connect bank accounts to their apps to unlock the power of open banking.

As TechCrunch Senior Editor Alex Wilhelm explained in this piece last year, Belvo might be considered similar to U.S.-based Plaid, but more attuned to the Latin American market so it (Read more...)

TrueLayer raises $70M for its open banking platform

by Steve O'Hear

TrueLayer, the London startup that offers a developer-friendly platform for companies, including other fintechs, to utilise open banking, is disclosing $70 million in new funding.

The Series D round is led by new investor Addition. Existing investors, including Anthemis Group, Connect Ventures, Mouro Capital, Northzone and Temasek, also participated. New investors include Visionaries Club, Zack Kanter (CEO Stedi), Daniel Graf (ex-Uber, Google, Twitter) and David Avgi (ex-CEO SafeCharge, CEO UniPaaS).

TrueLayer says the Series D brings the total investment to date to $142 million. The injection of capital will be used to continue scaling its open banking network, which brings together payments, financial data and identity to enable companies to build new products that improve “how we spend, save, and transact online”.

This will include further development of premium open banking-based services that go beyond simply accessing open banking APIs and will enable more innovation across financial services, including embedded finance and payments more generally.

To do this, and to support what it says is growing demand, TrueLayer is expanding its engineering, product and commercial teams. In the past 12 months, the fintech has expanded its services across 12 European markets.

Over the years, TrueLayer CEO and co-founder Francesco Simoneschi and I have often pontificated on what open banking’s killer use case or use cases may turn out to be. We may finally have our answer: payments.

That’s because one aspect of open banking is payment initiation, which lets an authorised third party initiate the transfer of money out (Read more...)

Financial API provider Brick is building the infrastructure for open banking in Southeast Asia

by Catherine Shu

The adoption of financial apps is surging in Southeast Asian markets like Indonesia, the region’s most populous country. Founded by fintech veterans last year, Brick develops APIs that make it easier for tech companies to add identity verification and access financial data from their users. It is currently partnered with Indonesia’s seven largest banks, covering more than 90% of the country’s bank accounts, and plans to expand into all Southeast Asia countries.

More than three-fourths of Southeast Asia’s population is unbanked or underbanked, meaning that don’t have a bank account or access to traditional lending services. Brick will serve them as well, with products like mobile wallet and telcos APIs that are currently in beta and slated for launch next quarter.

The startup, which is now used by 250 developers and 35 tech companies, announced today it has raised new seed round. The amount of funding was undisclosed. Investors include investment firms Better Tomorrow Ventures, PT Prasetia Dwidharma, 1982 Ventures, Antler and Rally Cap Ventures, and angel backers like TrueLayer chief operating officer Shefali Roy, Cred chief executive officer Kunal Shah, Modalku CEO Reynold Wijaya, Carousell CEO Quek Siu Rui, and the founders of Nium, Xfers, Aspire, BukuWarung, ZenRooms and CareemPay.

Brick was founded in 2020 by chief executive officer Gavin Tan, an early employee at Aspire, a neobank for small- to mid-sized businesses, and chief technology Deepak Malhotra, previously co-founder of Indian neobank Slice and a former PayPal engineer.

Brick’s APIs have been deployed by personal financial (Read more...)