It’s been only half a year since we announced Europe’s first free open banking API, but we’ve already managed to launch 1,000 bank integrations and raise an additional 2.1 million euros! We kicked off our freemiumbusiness model on December 1st of last year with only 300 European bank APIs, which means we managed to add 700 in just a few months.
Our new business model already shows promise and has attracted investment from Black Pearls VC, Inventure, Highgoal Capital, ID4 Ventures, Calchas Holding and angel investors Artis Kehris, Henry Nilert, Gerri Kodres and Riivo Anton.
“We integrated more banks in the last six months than our competitors managed in a whole year. Having less legacy technology to maintain means we can move a lot faster.”
— Rolands Mesters, CEO and co-founder of Nordigen.
Our business was built on banking data analytics and providing data insights. After partnering with incumbent open banking platforms and experiencing firsthand having to pay for an API, we decided we could do things better. Investing additional capital into improving our already robust API platform will allow Nordigen to handle the influx of clients also fleeing exorbitantly priced open banking data services. We already managed to more than quadruple our number of API users within four months, and the recent launch of our self-service platform should further speed up the increase.
At Nordigen we believe that European open banking data should be free not just for open banking platforms, but also for the developers that use the platforms to connect to bank accounts and build their applications. Open banking incumbents still charge developers for access to bank APIs. Instead of making open banking more accessible, they’re taxing access to data that’s free under European banking laws (PSD2). We don't think it's fair.
In addition, we’re committed to focusing solely on open APIs created by banks. Some of the large industry players still use screen-scraping and reverse engineering technology as the default for connecting to European banks.
“It's time to wipe out screen scraping in Europe. It's expensive and hacky. Banks have built amazing APIs to let people migrate their account information securely and without friction. Nordigen allows developers to connect to these bank APIs for free.”
— Rolands Mesters, CEO and co-founder of Nordigen.
Use cases for open banking are rapidly expanding in several industries. The “buy now, pay later” industry experienced rapid growth during the last year, and the personal finance vertical is prime for the next super-app to appear on the scene. Credit cards and various lending applications have a crucial need for reliable data analysis and insights. The expansion of open banking allows fintechs to access user data and build better customer experiences.
“Establishing trust between the growing number of online transactions is a significant pain point for numerous industries. Nordigen’s experienced team and the world’s first free open banking data hub convinced us to support the company in this round.
Access to banking data is becoming a commodity and Nordigen is creating the next valuable layer on top by turning fragmented financial data into usable information for various types of businesses.”
— Aleksander Dobrzyniecki, Partner at Black Pearls VC.
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About Nordigen
Nordigen is the first free open banking API in Europe providing connections to all major European banks. Since launching in 2016, Nordigan has been an industry leader in building solutions for turning raw transaction data into actionable insights. As a licensed Account Information Service Provider (AISP) authorised in 31 European countries, the company ensures that there are no more upfront commitments and no hidden costs - just free access to PSD2 data. Their services are already used by some of the most innovative banks, lenders, and fintechs in Europe, and clients using the free API have already quadrupled in over just a few months.
Open Banking
