Payments company GoCardless announced it plans to acquire Nordigen, a Latvian open banking data provider.
The deal is expected to close later in the summer. Further terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
GoCardless will incorporate Nordigen’s next-generation open banking connectivity, which connects to more than 2,300 banks in 31 countries, into its account-to-account network.
The acquisition means the fintech will provide free open banking connectivity at scale, opening up self-serve access to account information services (AIS) to everyone.
In addition, its suite of premium data products help improve outcomes across a range of use cases from credit assessments to customer engagement.
Over the past 18 months it has launched its open banking-enabled Instant Bank Pay feature across multiple markets, as well as Verified Mandates, which combines AIS with direct debit to prevent fraud.
This deal will enable GoCardless to acquire in-house open banking connectivity, which it plans to build on in the near future by expanding coverage and adding new payment types such as Variable Recurring Payments.
Hiroki Takeuchi, Co-founder and CEO of GoCardless said,
“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. We’re excited to redefine what open banking can do with the talented Nordigen team now on board.”
Rolands Mesters, CEO Of Nordigen said,
“At Nordigen our mission is to help businesses around the world adopt and utilise open banking, enabling greater financial transparency and financial inclusion.
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.”
Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik
