Nordigen democratizes access to Open Banking

This past week, Nordigen hosted an extensive Q&A session to explain the scope of their free Open Banking APIs, specifically for account information, leveraging the Account Information Service Provider (AISP) license. For the link to the full recording, please check the end of this summary. We have also previously had the pleasure of interviewing the CEO Rolands Mesters for the eXponential Finance podcast.

Here are the key points to note from the Nordigen Q&A session:

• This is the first service that provides access to banks’ account information APIs free of charge, without any setup or running cost, and without any limitations (naturally, one is not allowed to re-sell this service to one’s customers for a fee)
• The Nordigen service will provide the data in raw form as provided from the bank, there will be no cleansing or harmonization of the data across multiple banks that could potentially compromise important data elements for a specific use case
• Nordigen expects increased usage of this functionality, and the development of new business models based on it, which will in turn scale the market for their other, paid-for analytics services, such as their transaction categorization engine; that is how they are ultimately going to make money (the use of these additional services is optional, of course)
• Having been in the market for a number of years, and built the access to many banks, Nordigen was expecting the price of AISP services to converge on zero much faster — their December 1 announcement will now accelerate that trend
• The implementation initially follows PSD2 regulation in Europe that required banks to open their data for AISP and PISP (Payment Initiation Service Provider, not covered by the Nordigen offering); while there are a few, slightly different data standards, Nordigen follows the so-called “Berlin Group” definition
• As an AISP, Nordigen has access to the account holder information, account balances and 90 days of transactions (those are the rules, practically, a much longer period is made available often by the banks), provided that the end users authorizes access
• For the most part, AISP cover the consumer bank accounts, but often, business bank accounts are accessible through the same framework — for details and the nuances by country & institution, you should discuss with the Nordigen team
• Within the 31 countries covered by the PSD2 framework, Nordigen goes live country-by-country, when they have about 90% coverage of the institutions in a particular country — for smaller countries, the four to five largest banks typically let you reach that threshold, while in larger countries this could entail 10–12 institutions
• Typically, customers can work on the Nordigen AISP license without obtaining their own; there are some exceptions, like the UK for example, which requires an individual license when making this information available to the end user; Nordigen simply provides the technical access, they do not sub-license under AISP as they feel the effort to do that is almost the same as obtaining a standalone license
• Beyond Europe, Nordigen is definitely looking to expand the availability of this free service to other regions in the future, especially where they are already active in the market through their premium analytics services, such as Australia, Central and South America

If you would like to listen to the full Q&A session, please turn to the Nordigen YouTube channel.

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