By Oliver Smith on Thursday 9 May 2019
If you can’t beat them, join them.
Sweden’s Tink is on a roll.
After closing a €56m funding round in February and promising to double the size of its European business, Tink is doing just that.
UK bank NatWest this morning announced it will partner with Tink to operate the personal finance management features of its banking app going forward.
Tink adds NatWest to its roster of European clients including BNP Paribas Fortis, ABN AMRO, Nordea and Klarna.
Daniel Kjellén, Tink’s co-founder and CEO, called the news: “a great testament to the quality of our technology – and to their dedication to improve its digital offering and customer experience.”
The partnership is Tink’s first in the UK, with the first NatWest features built on Tink’s tech due to go live in the fourth quarter of 2019.
For NatWest it appears to be an admission that its core banking app’s personal finance management features weren’t keeping up with the competition.
However, NatWest also last month starting trialling a separate new money management app, called Mimo, which it said would be rolled out later this year, so the Tink deal could be a stopgap until Mimo is ready for primetime.
At the time of Tink’s funding in February, Kjellén said the startup plans to launch in a further 11 markets by the end of the year, bringing its European network up to 20. He also said Tink will double its staff to 300 over the same period.
Tink’s backers include US venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, as well as Christian Clausen, former chairman of the European Banking Federation, and Revolut founder Nikolay Storonsky.
