Visa expanded open banking services with the acquisition of Tink, which claims connectivity to 3,400 banks, while Mastercard announced the acquisition of Finicity for the US market in June 2020 and just announced the acquisition of AIIA that claims connectivity to 2,900 European banks on the 7th.
Both Visa and Mastercard initially developed solutions for banks that leveraged the existing global network connectivity. But these acquisitions shift the global networks’ focus to cloud service offerings for Fintechs and banks to enable access to data and Pay By Bank payment methods.
Mercator’s publication, “How EU Open Banking APIs Have Stabilized to Support Alternative Networks,” provided snapshots for several of these Pay By Bank alternative networks. These include Instanea, a partnership between BNP Paribas and Token.io, the FIS Open Banking Hub, Kevin that converts card transactions to Pay By Bank transactions on the fly, Mastercard, PayIt by NatWest, TrueLayer, and Trustly:
“Today, Aiia’s open banking platform and expertise, including strong API connectivity and payment capabilities, has shown significant growth coupled with a relentless focus on quality. Aiia has brought to life a unique model for open banking in Europe, driven by data privacy, security, quality and access. Its customer-centric approach and ambition to create open banking that simply works complements Mastercard’s existing distribution channels, technology and data practices.
“For the past decade, we have worked to build Aiia into a leading and quality-driven open banking platform, which has onboarded hundreds of banks and fintechs onto safe and secure open banking rails. We have worked closely alongside banks, customers and local authorities to ensure that our APIs show the true effect of open banking. We’re excited to become a part of Mastercard and progress our journey of empowering people to bring their financial data and accounts into play – safely and transparently,” said Rune Mai, CEO & Founder, Aiia.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group