By Emily Nicolle on Wednesday 18 April 2018
The financial aggregator-turned-B2B fintech firm has released a third-party API, giving Nordic banks access to PSD2 data 18 months ahead of schedule.
After launching a personal finance app in 2012 that allowed users to view their bank accounts and credit cards, pay bills and open savings accounts all in one place, Tink turned its eyes towards creating a B2B offering so that Nordic banks could offer the same to their customers, too. Now Tink has launched a third-party API, granting developers across sectors access to financial data from over 300 banks in a single swoop.
The revised Payments Services Directive (PSD2) is scheduled to go live in 2019, however Tink says that it is already aggregating beyond PSD2 payments data. The platform is designed to make it faster and easier for developers to focus on building new products, while Tink handles authentication and consumer banking interaction.
“At Tink, we have been trailblazing PSD2 since 2012. The ability to aggregate data is what has enabled Tink to grow into the business it is today,” said Fredrik Hedberg, CTO and co-founder at Tink (pictured).
“We know from experience that there are countless developers out there with brilliant ideas – but innovation has been held back by the lack of access to financial data.”
The API’s initial launch is currently limited to banks in the Nordics, but Tink hopes to roll out the platform across Europe soon. The tech is already being used by Tink partners like SBAB, which launched a comparison tool that collates mortgage data from Tink, using information on current mortgage rates to offer its users a better deal.
Just last month, Belgian bank BNP Paribas Fortis announcedit would be using Tink’s aggregation, personal finance management (PFM) and payments tech to power its own digital banking app Hello Bank! later this summer. The news follows a recent trend of PFM acquisition in the banking sector, including the purchase of Pariti by Tandem Bankin the UK, and Clarity Money by Goldman Sachs’ online lending platform Marcusin the US earlier this week.
“Businesses can now come to us and implement something new in just a day, instead of having to wait for banks to open their APIs in two years’ time,” continued Hedberg. “By democratising access to financial data, Tink is tearing down the barriers to innovation, and becoming the missing link that has stopped these ideas from becoming reality.”
