Open banking platform Token has scored a new round of funding from investors including EQT Ventures and banking giant BNP Paribas.
Opera Tech Ventures and existing backer Octopus Ventures also took part in the $16.5m investment in Token, as did two other unnamed Middle East and Southeast Asian banks.
Token said the capital would be used to build on the success of its TokenOSTM platform and accelerate new ways of innovating payments with digital money and ID solutions.
The company was founded in 2015 by serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, whose former businesses FrameMaker and Infoseek were acquired by Adobe System and Disney respectively.
Its TokenOS open banking platform aims to enable a global ecosystem of banks, their customers and developers to initiate payments and move money and information securely, instantly and frictionlessly worldwide.
The company has more than 4,000 banks connected to its platform, and recently announced it has been selected by Mastercard as one of its partners to support the connectivity layer of its open banking hub.
Tokencustomers include Tandem Bank, Think Money Group, An Post, Sberbank Croatia and Slovenia, Khaleeji Commercial Bank.
Kirsch said, “For banks, establishing an early position in this new hyper-connected market is a competitive advantage.
“A new wave of independent financial apps and services will soon be available to their customers, so banks need to be clear about their future roles.
“By solving the infrastructure problem, Token enables them to focus on service innovation and delivery earlier than the competition.”
EQT Ventures partner Alastair Mitchell added, “The open banking wave – driven in Europe by PSD2 regulation – is a huge opportunity to create new value propositions for consumers, as well as dramatically improve existing ones.
“Such a fundamental change in the plumbing behind the movement of money creates big challenges for incumbents and large opportunities for new players to create whole new markets.
“Token is emerging as the definitive leader in open banking, having been selected by an increasing number of major players as the exclusive technology platform to underpin this new way of doing business.”
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