- Swedish start-up Open Payments has accrued a large sum of investment capital from a number of sources, including firms and angels
- The firm offers services which are compliant with the PDS2 Open Banking regulations, which come into force in September
- “Our platform is a much more secure, cost-effective and flexible solution for our customers and their end-users”, says firm’s co-founder
A start-up based in Sweden which helps to make the cross-border payments world more secure has raised more than one million euros in investment funding.
Open Payments, which is based in Stockholm, is a banking platform which offers banking and financial services integration options for third-party applications.
The company was launched in 2017 and has managed to raise the figure from a variety of investment sources.
Angel investors are involved, as are two firms – Luminar Ventures and Brightly Ventures. It follows an investment from Vidici Ventures, which took place before this round.
Its core offer is that it is compliant with PSD2, an Open Banking regulation designed by the European Union to help ensure that the data generated by online money transfer transactions can be used in consumers’ interests.
It helps customers to integrate seamlessly with their banks through application programming interfaces, or APIs.
Across Europe, this regulation is set to come into force when its deadline is reached in September.
Its solution also ensures that third parties such as service providers and partners – like suppliers – can create their own market offerings under a white labelling system.
According to the co-founder of Open Payments, this sort of technology is required by many organisations as soon as possible due to their old technology becoming “obsolete”.
“Several organisations within the EU claim that they are already operating within the framework of PSD2”, said Louise Brandt, who is CCO at Open Payments as well as a co-founder.
“The majority of these organisations are using what will soon become obsolete technology and APIs based on screen scraping and reversed engineering, while our platform is fully developed with the latest technology that PSD2 requires, i.e. open and standardized APIs. Therefore, our platform is a much more secure, cost-effective and flexible solution for our customers and their end-users, giving us a huge advantage over existing solutions.”
For Brightly Ventures, one of the firms responsible for investing in the firm, Katja Bergman said that Open Payments was contributing to “democratizing” the payments system.
“We met the team some time ago, and are struck by the insight, vision and execution power of the team”, she said.
“We are seeing powerful transformational forces beginning to reshape the global payment service landscape.”
“Open Payments is democratizing payments, for the European retailers, businesses and banks, enabling many new innovations, with a positive effect to European businesses and consumers. One could say that Open Payments transforms and opens up payments, like Linux transformed operating systems”, she added.
Find out how firms like Open Payments and other fintech organisations are helping to make the world of payments better for customers over at our magazine page.