Romania already registers thousands of Open Banking users and an exponential increase in the number of accesses to banking APIs in the first quarter of the year, one and a half year after the first commercial implementation. The Finqware platform, the first local banking data platform under the European PSD2 regulation, has registered over 10,000 active users of bank account query services. To support these services, the Finqware platform made over 18 million data calls to the APIs of Romania’s most important banks in the first three months of 2022.
Finqware, the Romanian Open Banking startup, connected the first Romanian banks in 2020 and is currently being used by two of Romania’s most important financial institutions, Banca Transilvania and CEC. Through the Finqware platform, they offer their online banking clients querying services and payment initiation services to and from accounts of other banks, directly from their own applications (NeoBT, BTPay, CEC Mobile & CEC Internet Banking).
Bank account querying services from an external interface are possible since 2018 within the European Union, thanks to the PSD2 (Revised Payment Directive) regulation, which obliges banks to open digital channels for automatic transmission of bank data at the request of their users. These interfaces are called application programming interfaces (APIs).
The PSD2 regulation comes in recognition of the “fintech revolution” in the European payment services market and gives FinTech institutions a significant role in the future of the financial environment. Romania is one of the most advanced countries in the region regarding population usage of the benefits offered by the European Commission’s regulation on payments.
Thanks to this regulation and the API technology, Europeans can make online payments, even in physical stores, directly from their bank account, without using a card. For people with multiple bank accounts, these changes will allow access to information about existing accounts, from one place, in a secure data environment. The connection coverage of the banking APIs in Romania is in full expansion and is available for consultation on the Finqware website (link).
“Most banking APIs in Romania, with few exceptions, work well enough and offer their customers reliable services. Our sustained efforts over the last three years to test bank connections with real users and provide constant feedback to banks are now seen in the quality of these connections. These services allow Romanian companies to access a high level of innovation in financial operations, a norm in countries like the UK or the Nordic countries. There are already 5 million users of Open Banking services in the UK. We hope that most Romanian companies will adopt as soon as possible the capacities provided by our banking API aggregation platform: automation of cash flow monitoring, debt recovery or risk scoring, group or holding company centralized treasury, payment integration directly in the internal management systems of suppliers, etc.” says Cosmin Cosma, co-founder and CEO Finqware.
Encouraged by the accelerated evolution of digital banking, Finqware will launch in June 2022 the Open Banking platform for medium and large companies, FinqTreasury. The platform is currently in testing with ten companies that have decided to be among the first to experiment with open banking to automate their financial workflows.
(For more details for press contact Elena Cosma at elena.cosma@finqware.com)
