Imran Gulamhuseinwala speaking about open banking at a past LendIt Fintech event
[Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Ryan Weeks, formerly with Dow Jones and AltFi, covering fintech. This is the last in our four part series (here is part one, part two and part three) he is writing for us on the UK fintech market in the run-up to LendIt Fintech Europe on October 19-20.]
After a slow start, open banking – the regulatory framework under which the UK’s nine biggest banks must share transaction data with fintechs and other third parties – seems at last to be making a dent in financial services.
For evidence of the momentum it has established in the past nine months, look no further than the flurry of recent M&A activity.
TrueLayer, one of a group of intermediaries that sit between the big banks and consumers of transaction data, closed a $25m fundraising in September – taking the total amount it has raised to date to $72m.
Swedish open banking platform Tink bought UK-based OpenWrks’ aggregation platform in September, some six months after splashing $17.2m on Eurobits, a Spanish aggregator.
In August, card giant Visa’s $5.3bn proposed acquisition of Plaid, a US data-sharing infrastructure provider with a UK presence, was cleared by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Leon Muis, chief business officer of Yolt Technology Services (YTS), said it is encouraging to see so much activity.
“The market is so big that I strongly believe that for now at least there’s enough space for multiple parties,” he added.
YTS is currently fielding 26 million API calls every week, which it says is roughly 20% of the total volume in the UK.