Background refresh: the secret weapon behind powerful financial apps
With continuous access to customers' financial data, background refresh helps you give users more powerful and relevant services, without them having to lift a finger. And the really good news? You can start using background refresh to build the financial services of the future right away - even if you don't have your own PSD2 licence.
Background refresh silently updates customers’ financial data in the background up to four times a day.
This ensures the financial data in your app is up-to-date, without creating friction or additional work for the user.
Any business can get started right away, getting data through Tink’s PSD2 licence if you don’t have your own.
Creating more insightful services that add real value for your users, while requiring little or no effort on their part, is the key to more satisfied customers. Background refresh lets you do exactly that.
Fresh data flow
When you’ve created your knock-out app, and a user gives you access to their financial data for the first time, your algorithm can get to work on delivering a valuable service. But if you want to keep the financial data fresh beyond that initial ‘snapshot’, the user has to re-authenticate to their bank - creating friction and extra work.
Instead, with Tink’s background refresh feature, a user’s financial data is silently updated in the background - from however many bank accounts or services they give your app access to - without the user having to take any action. This gives you a consistent flow of fresh data from multiple sources, to get a more complete and up-to-date picture of users’ finances. It works in two ways.
If you’re accessing data covered by PSD2, like current account transactions, background refresh updates the data in your app up to four times a day for 90 days, at which point the user’s consent is needed to continue on for another 90 days. If the data being aggregated isn’t regulated under PSD2, such as investment and mortgage accounts, then background refresh can update users’ data on a daily basis for as long as their consent is active.
Background refresh can help you perform dynamic risk calculations and provide greater financial insight for account aggregation and personal finance management services. It enables "near-real-time" push notifications, process automation and analytics.
Access for everybody
One of the biggest boons for small and medium businesses is that this feature isn’t reserved for big players with the infrastructure and licences to meet all the terms and conditions. By accessing financial data through Tink’s PSD2 licence, any company big or small is covered for all regulatory, legal and data protection requirements, so you can skip straight to getting started on developing your service with secure and trusted technology.
Users can be onboarded seamlessly into your app with Tink Link, a front-end SDK for end-user authentication. It gives you access to over 2,500 banks across Europe through a single API, cutting costs and months of development time, to get your product to market in a flash. So what are you waiting for?
Background refresh is a game changer for anyone that wants to deliver a smooth, high-quality experience to their users, and create more insightful data-driven services that add real value to people’s financial lives - because you know the customer data you’re working with is always up-to-date.
For inspiration on the new services or user experiences you can build with access to quality data, take a look at our solutions.
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