In theory, access to open banking data in Europe is free and businesses should be able to connect to official bank APIs, access user-consented account data, and start building new products and applications for their customers — all of which is mandated by PSD2. In practice, open banking in Europe is still a hot mess.
Navigating between PSD2 licences and certificates, connecting to the regulated open APIs, and deciphering third party account aggregators and tech startups is time consuming and expensive. Accessing the free data today is taxed. There’s no real “try before you buy” with open banking in Europe today. It's “pay to play,” and it’s less than ideal.
It's Time for Change
Today Nordigen is introducing free access to PSD2 data across Europe with our latest Account Information product. Account Information is a free API that connects to major European banks and provides regulated, consented access to user banking information from a few months to several years. As part of the free offering, Nordigen, an authorized AISP, will also offer 90-day connectivity to user's bank accounts with background refresh up to four times a day.
This means no more upfront commitments and no hidden costs, just free access to PSD2 data.
A viable alternative to incumbents
There are a variety of incumbents that are expanding their services outside the direct PSD2 scope by creating custom banking APIs. While these are valuable services, they are costly to build and maintain, causing incumbents to charge a lot of money for access to open banking data.
Nordigen, however, connects to free regulated PSD2 APIs that are constantly improving. This allows us to have a significantly less expensive technology stack while reducing any friction for businesses to connect to open banking.
This means no more custom APIs, no screen-scraping and no storing of user credentials, just free access to PSD2 data.
A completely different business model
To finance free access to open banking data, Nordigen provides analytics services on top of bank data, including Transaction Categorisation and Insights. Since launching in 2016, we've been among the industry leaders in building solutions for turning raw transaction data into actionable insights, and our Premium and Enterprise services are already used by some of the most innovative banks, lenders, and fintechs in Europe. For businesses that will want to extract more value from their free PSD2 data, Nordigen is the best choice for data analytics.
With the launch of our free Account Information product, we're hoping to change how open banking is done across Europe. We may be the first to launch a “freemium open banking” service but we don’t plan to be the last, as we hope to see a similar approach being taken across all countries where open banking regulation is introduced.
This means no more barriers, just free access to open banking data.
Product details
Our AISP licence is authorized in 28 countries in Europe, allowing us to provide connectivity to all major European banks with production-ready PSD2 APIs. Plus our free API will cover access to all basic data points and functionality that's included in the PSD2 framework.
Core features:
- Access to private and business accounts
- Access to user name and bank account numbers
- Access to the last 3-24 months of user's transaction history for each account
- Continuous 90-day access to user's bank account information with background refresh 4 times per day
Main benefits:
- Fast - we use official bank APIs only, no screen-scraping or fancy custom APIs
- Frictionless - we don't use “custom APIs,” all users are redirected to real bank pages for authentication, they never share their bank credentials with anyone
- Compatible - our bank data API works great with our premium Transaction Categorisation and Insights products
Ready to start building?
If you're interested in accessing our free Account Information API, please sign up here: https://nordigen.typeform.com/to/CjWVK2f2
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Article by
Rolands Mesters
