Open banking platform Tink raises $63 million (GS, HSBC)

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Open banking platform Tink announced that it raised €56 million ($63 million) in an investment round led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors SEB, ABN AMRO Digital Impact Fund, and Nordea Ventures, among others. New investors included Nikolay Storonsky, cofounder of neobank unicorn Revolut.

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Tink allows its partners, including big banks and fintechs, to build account aggregation, payment initiation, data enrichment, and personal finance management products with its plug and play application programming interfaces (APIs).

Its partners can integrate Tink’s products into their existing apps or use them to develop stand-alone services. The funds will be used to expand its European connectivity to 20 markets by year-end, build four more offices, and double its workforce from 150 employees currently. The startup also announced it’s launching in five new European markets — the UK, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Belgium — bringing its total number of markets to nine.

Competition among open banking API providers is heating up amid heightened demand for their products. Tink already boasts high-profile partners such as BNP Paribas Fortis, ABN AMRO, SEB, and Klarna — and now it’s secured a significant amount of funding to expand into new markets.

Further, the funding round reportedly pegs Tink at a €240 million ($272 million) post-money valuation, per TechCrunch, citing sources familiar with the matter. However, Tink’s not alone in the space; we’ve seen activity from other open banking API providers in 2019 so far: Truelayer expanded in Germany last month to provide its APIs to major banks such as Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, and earlier this week, Bud raised $20 million in a funding round co-led by Goldman Sachs and HSBC.

Increasing demand for API platform providers signals competition among banks is also accelerating. One of the main aims of the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and Open Banking is to intensify competition in retail banking and enable a long overdue shake-up in the sector.

And at the center of these initiatives are consumers. Spurring competition allows new players, such as fintechs and big techs, to compete against banks, but also urges incumbents to innovate beyond their current business models to create new consumer-centric ideas, such as convenient new ways for people to manage their finances.

By granting partners access to their technology, Tink and other open banking providers help to accelerate this process as partnering banks and fintechs are able to quickly and easily build and launch new products that enhance customer experience and are tailored to their broad client base.

Source: Business Insider