Omnibank is still alive and kicking!
UPDATE 03/17: Omnibank is now renamed ibanity for compliance reasons, you can read why in our latest story.
Omnibank aims at providing software developers an API to access bank information. Getting hooked up to your data shouldn’t take more than the time your coffee needs to pour. Want to meet us? We will be at the Fintech Summit on October 13 and pitching at the ING Fintech Conference.
It’s now been almost two months since our first announcement where we came out of the woods with Omnibank. After all this time, things have been moving at a rapid pace. We are now supporting more banks and got in touch with several financial institutions to pitch the project.
We already met most of the Belgian banks
Thanks to the traction we had with our first post, banks and financial institutions were curious to meet us. We met with a dozen of them, we got a chance to demo our product as it is at the moment, explain the underlying magic and expose them how we wanted to position ourselves on the market with Omnibank. PSD2 will bring a lot of new opportunities by itself but we would also like to tap into all that is out of PSD2's scope. We want to become the prefered platform for developers to interact with banks by providing added value in terms of data quality, monitoring, support, documentation and added value features on our API.
We have added more banks to our list
We’re happy to tell you that we added, through the same techniques as before, 3 more banks to our list of supported establishments. We now have a mix of large and small banks. We are currently in discussion with them to make this support more official. As soon as we make progress on this point, we’ll let you know. Right now, we still haven’t planned on disclosing the names of the banks we support.
What does it look like?
We got lots of feedback from the #betech community and met with quite a lot of software developers, startups, Fintechs, software providers and we tried to show them the complete value stream as much as possible. Since about a month ago, we have finished a very rough version of our developer portal that we use during current demos. It gives an idea of the complete flow and shows that it wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to access your banking data with our current technical solution. All relevant data has been anonymised.
We currently focus on what we call the “single user” use-case, meaning a single person accessing his own or his company’s banking data. We do not support third parties such as PFMs and customer facing apps on Omnibank yet. Of course, we plan to support it in the near future.
What’s next for us?
Discussions, discussions, discussions… Now that we have the proper means to show the value it could bring, the next step is to get the banks onboard. We are actively discussing with 2 of them and will hopefully have an agreement to move forward by the end of 2016. Yup, not as fast as we would all like, but it’s already a big step for those banks.
How can you help?
A lot of you asked how you could help. Several suggested they could develop and maintain libraries in different programming languages and that’s awesome!
However, the simplest and best way you can help us is to bug your bank! Contact your relationship manager, send a helpdesk message, tweet, post on facebook, tell your bank you want to access your data through Omnibank.
The more software developers, agencies, companies ask their bank to be supported by Omnibank, the easiest it will be for us to convince their Marketing and Innovation departments. Use #omnibankio so we can keep track of your actions.
Our message to the banks
You should not fear what’s ahead. Disruption of the financial sector and digitalisation will happen. We believe it is a chance for banks to reinforce the relationship they have with their existing customers.
The best move is to be ahead of the curve, to consider this a chance to build a new distribution channel with its own user experience, a distribution channel focused on software developers. Because they are also customers of yours and they are and will be the ones building software for your competitors, Fintechs, startups or for the SME next door. Don’t ignore their call and let us help you figure out how to deal with them.
We are exactly like those software developers and we know what they would like to use in their day to day work. We are ready to help you, but will you let us?
Drop us an email at contact@omnibank.io or follow us on twitter @omnibank_io
