In a recent development, Yapily, an ‘API Only’ technology provider whose mission is to enable innovative products to connect to banks has secured a $5.4 million (€4.85M) in seed funding.
This round was led by HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and LocalGlobe along with other investors including Taavet Hinrikus, TransferWise Chairman and Co-founder, Ott Kaukver, Twillio’s CTO and Roberto Nicastro, UniCredit’s former deputy CEO.
The company is planning to utilize this fund to expand its team mainly in tech and sales and to accelerate the development.
Stefano Vaccino, founder and CEO of Yapily, said:
I was inspired to build Yapily when I realised how revolutionary open banking would be and its social impact. Yapily offers a frictionless journey that lowers the open banking technical barrier without interfering with a company’s relationship with their consumer. I believe that we can democratise finance by making it possible for consumers to share their information in seconds through APIs.
This can speed up loan approvals for small businesses, or even reduce the cost of all e-commerce transactions by 1 – 2%, a saving which can be passed on to the consumer. There is also a great opportunity here to help people overcome financial exclusion by giving consumers full visibility of their incomings and outgoings, and even warning them if they are embarking on financially risk behaviour.
Yapily – What you need to know
Yapily offers a secure, seamless API that can potentially connect enterprises to 250m bank accounts across Europe. This platform offers service providers an easy way to retrieve financial data and initiate payments by providing one single secure API to connect to all retail banks’ open API.
Customers include accountancy firms, companies in the payment space, cryptocurrency providers, digital wealth applications and e-commerce companies.
Remus Brett, investor at LocalGlobe and Barbod Namini, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures partner, said: “We are on the brink of open banking, and this is creating a huge opportunity to innovate finance, around the world. We are incredibly excited about the scale of what Yapily offers and think that its focus on API technology can deliver a game-changing solution for enterprises and ultimately for the end consumer.”
Open Banking revolution!
Open Banking regulations require all banks to permit their customers to share their own transaction data with third parties if they wish to do so, which is made possible through application programming interfaces or APIs. On the other hand, the same APIs could also be used to initiate cheap and fast payments.
How does Yapily help?
Using Yapily platform, a company can access all the banks offering open banking services via a single API rather than having to build and maintain hundreds of APIs of their own.
Yapily is currently connected via API to 35 of the biggest banks in Europe, both for data retrieval and payments initiation. Furthermore, the company expects to connect to 536 banks by the year-end.
Deadline!
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has said the use of secure APIs provides significant benefits for consumer protection and market integrity. Having said that, the UK is ahead of many other European countries on open banking, but September will see the deadline for banks across Europe to have an API in place when the PSD2 (revised payment service directive) becomes available.
By mid-September, 5000 banks across Europe will need to have an API in place. Governments in Australia, Japan, Canada, Singapore, South Korea, Mexico and several other countries are also committed to delivering open banking.
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech startup world.
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