Having just filled its war chest with €90m of fresh capital, Swedish banking portal Tink is gearing up to roll out its services across Europe on a massive scale.
Tink will use the money to expand its client base – that already includes 2,500 banks and FinTechs – and to evolve its products even more. Its customers include payment giant PayPal, FinTech unicorn Klarna and banks like NatWest, Nordea and SEB.
The scaleup’s API empowers customers in the financial sector – both incumbent banks and FinTech startups – to access aggregated financial data, initiate payments, enrich transactions and build personal finance management tools.
Since its launch in 2012, Tink has also become a champion of open banking. For instance, last summer Tomas Prochazka, vice president of product at Tink, called for European regulators to show some leeway when it seemed as if the financial services sector would struggle to implement the strong customer authentication rules before the September deadline. The rules are part of the EU’s Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2). Some regulators eventually agreed.
Tink is currently live in the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands.
“The investment round will facilitate our ambitious growth plans over the next year and beyond,” said Daniel Kjellén (pictured), co-founder and CEO Tink. “During 2020 we are committed to building out our platform with more bank connections and, on top of that, expanding our product offering.
“Our aim is to become the preferred pan-European provider of digital banking services and to offer the technology needed for banks, FinTechs and startups to leverage the opportunities of open banking and enable them to successfully develop financial services of the future. Two key factors for succeeding with that are that we strengthen our European coverage and continue to deliver new data-products on top of this infrastructure to our customers.”
Early-stage investor Dawn Capital joined venture capital firms HMI Capital and Insight Partners to co-lead the new investment round.
“As the world of banking undergoes a fundamental shift, from analogue to digital and from closed to open, banks and financial services require a new set of technical foundations on which to build a winning product strategy for the coming decades,” said Josh Bell, general partner at Dawn Capital.
“Tink has become a trusted partner amidst growing demand from Europe’s leading banks and FinTechs seeking to build better and more creative financial products and services. Our investment underlines the confidence that the industry has in Tink’s category-leading technology and we look forward to supporting them on their continued journey.”
The Italian postal operator and financial services network Poste Italiane also joined the round. Existing investors Heartcore Capital, ABN AMRO Ventures and Opera Tech Ventures, BNP Paribas’ venture arm, also returned with fresh capital.
Tink’s latest funding round is another sign of how the Nordic FinTech scene is coming into its own. The industry raised over $2.7bn across 394 deals between 2014 and the third quarter of 2019, according to FinTech Global’s data. Moreover, 35.4% of that investment was raised across the first nine months of 2019 alone.
The average deal size has increased more than four-fold from just $5.9m in 2014 to $24.2m in the first three quarters of 2019, indicating that investors are returning to back established FinTech scaleups and not just early-stage startups.
Swedish FinTech firms have captured 79.1% of total FinTech investment raised in the Nordics between 2014 and the third quarter of 2019. This is unsurprising as Sweden is one of the leading countries in the world for FinTech innovation due to its population being quick to adapt to new financial technologies.
Payment company Klarna’s $460m investment round in August, payment card provider Pleo and Danish challenger bank Lunar Way are just some of the Nordic FinTech firms to raise big rounds over the years.
Tink investor Dawn Capital has previously invested in companies like Quantexa and ZIVVER.
Insight Partners has previously backed government-focused payments provider PayIT, spend management solution provider Fairmarkit and contract lifecycle management software company ContractPodAI.
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