TrueLayer set to expand its services through Visa network
It is almost a year ago when I first spoke with fintech TrueLayer as part of my Fintech interview series, and the company is making significant progress.
A $35m round of funding round, led by Temasek and Tencent and a partnership with Visa are recent achievements.
The company puts the tech into fintech as it provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that enable finance providers and fintechs to offer services to customers.
Set up in London in 2016. It is a child of the EU’s Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA’s) rules for open banking in the UK. These mean banks must be able to give third-party financial services suppliers access to customer data, if the customer agrees, through APIs. It currently offers two APIs, one for payments and another for data.
TrueLayer is currently expanding internationally and is establishing its services, currently only available in the UK, across Europe and Australia.
It could expand quickly through its latest partnership which is with credit card giant Visa. TrueLayer has just announced that it has become a fintech partner with Visa which will enable it to serve global businesses with its open banking APIs via Visa’s network.
Shefali Roy, chief operating officer at TrueLayer told me the company’s open banking products, a data API and payments API will be available on Visa’s platform. “There are loads of fintechs and collaborative businesses that work with Visa to serve their customers and we will now be on that platform.”
She gave the example of a business using it in their ecommerce system to enable them to use bank to bank payments rather than credit card accounts to make payments. “This would enable corporates to offer not only a credit card rail to pay but also a bank to bank option.”
It will be immediately possible in the UK for Visa customers to access the APIs because they are already integrated with the major UK banks. But this will eventually help TrueLayer expand globally through Visa’s huge customer base. TrueLayer will have work to do to integrate with banks outside the UK first, but this is already happening.
“We need to connect the APIs into the banks in new regions before we offer our services,” said Roy. The fact that the company is on the Visa network means it could have a ready-made customer base once this integration is done.
It will have integrated with other banks in Europe by the end of the year.
In Australia TrueLayer is testing and integrating with banks in preparation for launching in February 2020.
“As we build it Visa will turn on the options for customers,” said Roy.
Roy was previously the European chief compliance officer at payments fintech Stripe.