GoCardless Secures Goes Open Banking With Nordigen Buy

Digital payment solution GoCardless is to acquire Nordigen, an open banking data provider. In merging, the companies connect the two pillars of open banking: account-to-account (A2A) payments (GoCardless)  and access-to-account (Nordigen).

The deal, announced Friday (July 1), is expected to close later in the summer. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

According to the GoCardless press release that announced the news, Nordigen offers the widest access-to-account coverage in Europe. By deploying Nordigen’s technology, GoCardless will be able to connect more than 2,300 banks in 31 countries into its A2A network.

The announcement is the latest move from GoCardless as it accelerates its open banking strategy. Over the past 18 months, the FinTech has launched two open banking products: Instant Bank Pay and Verified Mandates.

The deal will bolster GoCardless’ in-house open banking connectivity. It will help the company expand coverage and add new payment types such as variable recurring payments.

“The Nordigen acquisition will take us to the next level. By intelligently combining free, state-of-the-art open banking connectivity with deep payment expertise, we can now offer open banking-as-a-service to any developer, partner or FinTech,” GoCardless Co-founder and CEO Hiroki Takeuchi said in a press release. “We believe this open access will lead to experimentation, and that will create even more compelling use cases.”

Rolands Mesters, CEO Of Nordigen, added: “At Nordigen, our mission is to help businesses around the world adopt and utilize open banking, enabling greater financial transparency and financial inclusion. We share GoCardless’s excitement about the growth of open banking, and we’re delighted to join forces with a group of people who not only share our passion for driving game-changing innovation in financial services but will also help us bring free open banking access to a far wider audience.”

Earlier this week, Nordigen announced it had partnered with digital accounting service Acounto to provide transactional data for bookkeeping operations.

The Acounto partnership is the second deal Nordigen has struck with accounting software developers after it joined forces with Cashology in April.

More on this: Cashology, Open Banking Firm Nordigen Launch Accounting Platform