Launching our platform in Italy and Portugal
As part of our European expansion, we are launching our open banking platform in Italy and Portugal. Any local business, bank or developer can access the financial data of tens of millions of consumers – and offer personalised and data-driven services to meet their evolving demands. In the dynamic Italian market, we are also announcing the opening of our Milan office.
Italy and Portugal have been making exciting leaps in financial services, with both banks and fintechs responding to an increasingly mobile banking and commerce landscape. To boost this development, we’re launching our platform in these markets to allow businesses and developers to build the next generation of financial services.
In both countries, we’ve built connections to the PSD2 APIs of the major banks, providing access to the data through our single API. Our aim with this launch is to help advance the financial ecosystems – allowing innovators to embrace the era of data-driven innovation, and deliver smart and personalised customer experiences.
Covering 90% of Portuguese consumers
We recently partnered with Portugal’s biggest bank, Caixa Geral de Depósitos, to launch their personal finance management app DABOX – powered by open banking APIs. The next logical step on our journey is to open up that opportunity not just for banks – but for businesses of all sizes.
Developers can now access enriched PSD2 data from the 20 largest financial institutions in Portugal. This means they can access transactions from a total of nine million (or 90 percent of) Portugese bank customers – and an additional 250 million through our wider European coverage.
We worked closely with the Portuguese payment processor and open banking platform SIBS to connect to these open banking APIs.
The appetite for digital banking in Portugal is growing fast. Proof of that is the popularity of DABOX, which gained tens of thousands of users just a few months after launch (and recently won the prize for ‘best app’ in the European Excellence Awards).
Planting our flag in Italy
Italy’s payments and commerce ecosystem is digitalising rapidly through government- and bank-led initiatives, and it translates to great promise for the country’s open banking movement.
In tandem with our platform launch, we’ve also opened our local Tink office in Milan. And we’ve tapped Marie Johansson to head up our Italian operations as country manager. Marie has already seen a market abuzz with activity, with banks eager to explore open banking tech to meet the quickly evolving demands of a mobile-savvy generation of consumers.
Marie Johansson, Country Manager Italy
But while the opportunities are great, so is competition. Italy’s banks are undoubtedly feeling the pressure from the likes of Apple and Amazon, as the big tech players make inroads into the Italian open banking and payments ecosystem – sometimes by partnering up with the incumbents.
To craft their own response, Italian businesses and developers can now access 33 million local bank accounts (with end users’ consent, of course) through the 12 financial institutions and fintechs we’ve connected with.
A place to fast-track your ideas
You can access all open banking data through the Tink Console, an admin interface that lets you build with our platform. And to make getting started as easy as possible, you can use Tink’s PSD2 license* instead of having to spend time acquiring your own.
The best part of the platform is Tink Link, a drop-in component that allows you to seamlessly facilitate the authentication journey for users – regardless of the market or the bank with which they’re trying to connect.
Localised Tink Link flow for Italy – customers select their bank, authenticate and connect to their accounts through a Tink-powered service.
With thousands of developers across Europe already working on their ideas through Tink’s platform, Italian and Portuguese innovators can now start using financial data to build better services or entirely new user experiences, such as holistic financial overviews or simpler onboarding processes.
*All businesses that offer regulated financial services – such as banks, fintechs, PSPs and lenders – need their own PSD2 licenses, eIDAS certificates, and onboard with the relevant ASPSPs. They cannot rely on Tink’s passported license to use our platform.
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