GoCardless has announced plans to acquire open banking data provider Nordigen, accelerating its vision to become a global bank payment network leader.
The direct banking firm will look to integrate Nordigen’s ‘next-generation open banking connectivity’, expanding its coverage across Europe connecting with banks in 31 countries to its account-to-account (A2A) network.
The planned acquisition will enable GoCardless to tap into Nordigen’s open banking data, enabling provision of self-serving access to account information services for its customers.
Furthermore, this suite of data helps improve outcomes for a variety of use cases which can range from credit assessments to customer engagement.
“Over the past few years it’s been amazing to watch open banking grow from a trend on the horizon to a global phenomenon,” stated Hiroki Takeuchi, Co-Founder and CEO of GoCardless.
“We realised early on that this technology would drive bank payments for decades to come and over the last 18 months. We’ve accelerated our push into open banking as part of our vision to build the world’s bank payment network.
“The Nordigen acquisition will take us to the next level. By intelligently combining free, state-of-the-art open banking connectivity with deep payment expertise, we can now offer open banking-as-a-service to any developer, partner or fintech. We believe this open access will lead to experimentation, and that will create even more compelling use cases.”
The announcement comes off the heels of GoCardless’ launch of its open banking feature, Instant Bank Pay. Along with this new feature, the banking firm also debuted its fraud prevention function, Verified Mandates.
With its new functions and planned acquisition of Nordigen, GoCardless is ramping up its efforts to embrace the open banking space. The deal will allow GoCardless to step up its plans to build new payment types, such as Variable Recurring Payments, to its payments portfolio.
Rolands Mesters, CEO Of Nordigen, added: “We share GoCardless’s excitement about the growth of open banking, and we’re delighted to join forces with a group of people who not only share our passion for driving game-changing innovation in financial services, but will also help us bring free open banking access to a far wider audience.”
The deal is expected to close late summer. Further terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
