Open Payments closes seed round on €1.2m to support launch in Nordics and Europe

Sweden-based Open Payments has closed its seed funding round on €1.2m to support launch of its product in the Nordics and Europe.

Investors included Brightly Ventures, Luminar Ventures and a selection of unnamed angel backers.

Having closed the round, Open Payments will look to grow its team and launch the platform in the Nordic and European markets. Currently, the company is working on a number of collaborations.

The FinTech claims to be the first in the Nordic region to offer a ‘genuine’ PSD2 aggregated platform which initiates account-to-account payments and retrieves account information and transaction history via one API. Open Payments aims to become a leading provider in the EU and establish an ecosystem for open banking based on PSD2, it said.

PSD2’s final deadline is September 14 and banks will be required to release their open APIs. Open Payments offers a single-API platform which lets a third-party provider access all the EU banks’ diversified APIs and then utilise the functions.

The platform will give third-parties access to profiles such as an Account Information Service Provider (AISP) or a Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP) to create apps and services. Furthermore, the solution has a development portal to let third party providers and business partners develop their own products and services under their own brand.

Open Payments offers an open and secure access point to numerous APIs in the Nordic market. Next year, the FinTech hopes to expand and integrate with other banks across the EU.

Open Payments co-founder and CCO Louise Brandt said, “Several organisations within the EU claim that they are already operating within the framework of PSD2. 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. It gives us a huge advantage over existing solutions that suffer from a large technical heritage.”

Earlier in the month, the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) published its open banking standard, giving further clarifications. Its goal is to ensure banks offer better features and move beyond just complying with PSD2.

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