TrueLayer and Anna in Open Banking tie-up

A partnership to power new features on Anna's business current account.

London-based fintech TrueLayer, which creates APIs to access data from financial services providers and banks, has partnered up with Anna to bring more features to the business current account provider.

Anna says account aggregation and faster VAT calculations based on Open Banking data are both in the works.

TrueLayer says it’s also in talks with Anna to add its payments API onto Anna’s platform, which would route payments via its infrastructure.

“As we’ve handled the regulatory and technical challenges surrounding the Open Banking APIs, ANNA’s team have been able to dedicate all their time and resources to enhancing their product,” said Francesco Simoneschi, the CEO and co-founder of TrueLayer.

“We’re looking forward to working closely with ANNA on more integrations which will provide even more services to its customers.”

One of the challenges with Open Banking, and the reason we’ve seen startups like Anna and Tandem working with third-party providers, is the speed at which high street banks can update their Open Banking APIs. Often changes are made with only two weeks notice, leaving startups to scramble in order to stop their Open Banking services from breaking.

“Companies from start-ups to the established have engaged Open Banking technology with varying degrees of usefulness,” said Anna’s Chief Product Officer, Nikita Filippov.

“It appears the majority of implementations are doing the basics in allowing access to transaction data from multiple sources.”

"But we at ANNA don’t think any of this goes far enough to serve customers with anything particularly useful or different. By partnering with TrueLayer we’ll be able to offer new, really useful applications of Open Banking. Or as we call it - Open Banking Plus.”