A Rough Guide to Europe’s Open Banking Platforms

It is now nearly seven years since the European Commission passed the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), and nearly three years since the final deadline for all businesses within the European Union to comply with PSD2’s technical standards.

Stepping up to help banks meet the requirements of the directive and create the infrastructure needed for account-to-account payments, several open banking platforms have risen to prominence in recent years.

As open banking matures, different platforms are honing their specialties and key players are defining their place in the emerging ecosystem.

Comparing open banking platforms is difficult as there is no standard measurement for coverage and different providers tend to specialize in different regions.

For example, in terms of the total number of bank APIs connected, Nordigen leads the pack, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily the right choice for a business that wants to start accepting open banking payments.

Read more: GoCardless Secures Open Banking With Nordigen Buy

Nordigen is more in the business of aggregating data than it is in the payments game. That said, last month GoCardless closed a deal to acquire the Latvian FinTech, which will see Nordigen’s impressive access to Europe’s bank accounts integrated into the GoCardless payment system.

Open Banking and Payments

One of the most frequently cited leaders in European open banking is Tink. The Visa-owned company has built a reputation for reverse engineering bank APIs, and is able to offer businesses direct data access that goes far deeper than transaction records.

Tink’s API can access an extensive range of financial data while the company has also built some of the most powerful analytics and categorization tools on the market. Tink has proven an especially popular provider with some of the biggest names in the industry and boasts clients spanning from legacy banks to innovative FinTechs.

More recently, Tink has enhanced its offering to lenders with the addition of Expense Check, a real-time credit assessment tool that helps loan issuers build an accurate picture of a customer’s creditworthiness based on comprehensive up-to-date transaction data.

More on this: Tink Offers Lenders Real-Time Look at Loan Applicants’ Expenses

In terms of initiating payments, TrueLayer may well have a claim to the title of Europe’s leading open banking platform. The U.K.-based FinTech allows any app developer to integrate open banking payments, including variable recurring payments, and has been one of the firms helping to drive open payments adoption in the U.K.

Read on: TrueLayer Introduces Variable Recurring Payments

What’s more, in the connected global economy, TrueLayer can help facilitate open banking payments far beyond the borders of the U.K. And through a partnership with Singapore-based cross-border payments platform Thunes, TrueLayer is being integrated into its platform as one of the payment methods for Thunes’ 100,000 merchants around the world.

Related: TrueLayer, Thunes Team on Open Banking Payments in Europe, UK

TrueLayer is an interesting case as it provides both an infrastructure and a payment method. In other words, it does the work of aggregating account data and mediating between APIs, but also packages its technology together into a payments solution that merchants can use.

Another London-based firm that is generating a lot of excitement in the field is Yapily. Unlike TrueLayer, Yapily focuses on the infrastructure layer and leaves the payments side of things to its partners, one of which is Volt, the real-time payment specialist that uses the Yapily API to power its open payments gateway.

Also related: Pleo Teams With Yapily to Power SMB Cash Flow

Not to be confused with Volt, Amsterdam-based open banking provider Yolt provides both account information and payment initiation services to clients in the banking and finance sector, as well as helping to facilitate payments for a range of businesses from eCommerce to utilities and insurance.

Launched by Dutch banking group ING as a personal financial management app in 2017, the firm has been positioning itself as a one-stop-shop for European open banking and last year was granted PSD2 licenses in both the U.K. and the EU.

But last month, ING announced that it would be phasing out the open banking platform, citing a “rapidly evolving and changing market” as the main factor behind the decision.

Learn more: What Yolt’s Exit Means For Europe’s Competitive Open Banking Market

Besides the FinTechs discussed here, the likes of Mastercard-owned Aiia, Klarna and Token have all made notable contributions to Europe’s contemporary open banking ecosystem and will surely continue to shape how the field develops.

To complicate matters further, non-European firms like Plaid also have an interest in the continent’s open banking project while the global card networks are unlikely to allow the ascendent payments paradigm to leave them in the dust.

For example, as much as open banking is lauded as a way to bypass the likes of Visa and Mastercard, both companies also have a stake in its continued growth, the former through Tink and the latter through Aiia.

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