Fintech Tink gets UK expansion rolling with NatWest deal

Swedish fintech Tink has signed up its first UK bank to its open banking services, in its drive to expand significantly in the UK

NatWest is going to use Tink’s platform which offers open banking capabilities.

I recently interviewed Fredrik Hedberg, co-founder and CTO at Tink. He told me the UK was a new market for the company, which it wants to build significantly. It recently opened a London Office.

It appears to have got the ball rolling with a significant win. NatWest is integrating Tink’s technology. Tink is an interesting company because although it has been around since 2012 it has since changed its business model from offering consumers a financial management product to offering banks a platform to use to build their own open banking services.

In fact Tink was doing open banking even before legislation was introduced, in the form of PSDII, to mandate banks to offer it to customers. It is now building Amazon Web Services for financial services companies, Hedberg told me.

Tink’s initial app, aimed at consumers, could be downloaded and connected to any bank. “We could collect a person’s complete financial profile through a single app,” said Hedberg.  After picking up half a million users with a B2C model it decide to target banks with a platform that they could use to build their own open banking services on top of.

The banks wanted a fast way to get the capabilities to connect to any bank in Europe and the ability to move money around regardless of which account or bank it was in. They also wanted to give data driven financial advice. Tink had this technology so decided to sell it on to banks.

Across Europe Tink already boasts a range of tier one banks as customers. These include BNP Paribas Belgium, ABN Amro, as well as well as fintechs ranging from large companies like Klarna to startups

Now for the first time a UK bank will incorporate the technology, with NatWest the first UK customer of this type for Tink.

NatWest recently launched an open banking feature to its mobile banking app that allows customers to see their account information at other banks. The Accounts with Other Banks option, as it is known, means customers that have accounts at 15 other UK banks can view all their activity through the NatWest mobile app.