05 April2017 – Token, Inc., a provider of a turnkeyopen banking platform for banks that enables them to quickly andcost-effectively comply with PSD2 and generate new revenue, today announces apartnership with OP Financial Group, the leading financial services and bankinggroup in Finland.
Thepartnership with Token will enable OP Financial Group to innovate in theEuropean open banking market and generate new revenue streams via futurepayment solutions.
Steve Kirsch, Founder and CEO, Token, comments: “Token is developing a global openbanking ecosystem based on an open and secure payments and information API. Through our platform, OP Financial Group will have accessto a fully operational API banking infrastructure which, when combined with thetransformative attributes of programmable money, has the power to change theway the world transacts.”
OPFinancial Group has a long history of technological innovation and earlyadoption. The OP Bank Group was the first financial services provider inEurope, and only second in the world, to offer online banking services, and OPFinancial Group has an established lab program that collaborates with fintechstart-ups to produce world-class digital services.
“Ourpartnership with Token reflects our mission to become a forerunner in thefuture of banking and payments,” comments Masa Peura, Director New Business, OPFinancial Group. “We’re using Token’s open banking software to get an earlyfoothold in a new era for payments. Together, API banking and programmablemoney have the potential to transform the way banks transact. In the shortterm, we are investigating interesting market opportunities with Token that putus in the driving seat and prepare us for the enactment of PSD2.”
KristianLuoma, Head of OP Lab, OP Financial Group continues: “Perhaps the mostimportant advantage of our partnership with Token is that it allows us todeliver better experiences to our customers faster than we could ourselves.With Token’s frictionless authentication programmed into each transaction, wecan boost security and increase payment speed and convenience. Ourcollaboration with Token also exemplifies OP’s new way of working withstart-ups in general. Through our Lab program, we’re able to move faster withpartnerships like the one we have established with Token.”
Steve Kirsch added: “OP Financial Group has always beenforward looking, and its culture of innovation makes it a perfect partner forToken. The capabilities that our software provides, combined with OP’s appetitefor change, makes this a very powerful proposition indeed.”
Token provides the industry’s simplest and most securetransaction-based open banking API.Banks use Token’s software to issue and redeem payment andaccount information authorisations as smart tokens, which can be programmedwith any number of terms and conditions in accordance with the instructions ofthe account holder. This enables each smart token to be uniquely specified tothe transaction it represents and enables value added services to be integratedin just the same manner. Sensitive account information never leaves the bank’ssystems, masked or otherwise, vastly reducing the bank’s securityvulnerabilities.
When PSD2, the revised EuropeanDirective on Payment Services, comes into force in January 2018 European bankswill be required to grant third party providers access to their customers’data. Banks must accomplish this task while ensuring their customers’ dataremains secure throughout the process. Token not only delivers this, it goesone step further, enabling banks to create new sources of revenue from APIaccess such as the execution of digital transactions and the fulfilment ofaccount data requests. This new model puts banks in complete control of thedigital transaction chain, lowering costs and mitigating the trend towardsdisintermediation from today’s payment-enabling third parties.
