How did Finicity get its start as an open banking platform?
Finicity was launched in 2000 with a vision to help individuals and families improve their financial health. We launched with Mvelopes, one of the first fintech budget apps, with data aggregation connections to around 1,200 financial institutions in the United States. As the years went by, we soon had one of the few fully connected, consumer-permissed, open banking platforms in the world — with integrations to more than 10,000 banks. Partnering with the banks as stewards of this data, Finicity worked closely with these FIs to ensure all concerns were addressed — highlighting a greater consumer-centric approach to accessing and protecting data. Those relationships led to our first data access agreements providing direct API access to consumer-permissioned data.
Finicity, recently acquired by Mastercard, is now a leader in data access agreements with many of the nation’s largest financial institutions, credit card companies and wealth management institutions. This level of data access provides the highest quality data in the most secure manner for third parties to connect to financial institutions and better serve their customers.
How can companies grow and digitize with Finicity’s solutions/APIs?
Fintechs can grow quickly with the Finicity global open banking platform. Our consumer-driven approach to data access ensures that financial institutions are working with Finicity to ensure that consumers have the access to, and the ability to share, their financial data with fintechs. Banks, institutional lenders or other traditional financial services companies can also continue their digital transformation with the help of Finicity’s APIs to connect new data sources and streamline manual processes.
With connections to over 10,000 financial institutions, Finicity covers over 95% of the U.S. market. We’ve also tested our data in the most rigorous lending markets, where data quality is an absolute must. In a matter of minutes, you can verify income or employment, open accounts, make payments, verify account owner or balance, or just look at historical transactions or bank statements.
What challenges keep banks and fintech up at night?
Fintechs need reliable access to consumer data for their apps or services, especially as consumers’ trust lags when it comes to how their data is used. Banks, meanwhile, are many times the trusted entity in comparison, but they often lose customers to financial challengers who provide new or differentiated financial services.
Open banking platforms, like Finicity, and their secure access to consumer-permissioned data, can help banks free up their customer data without losing their customers and can help fintechs provide their customers with exactly the data and services they’re looking for.
What edge does Finicity provide banks and fintech?
Very early, Finicity identified tokenized access through APIs as the ideal way to access data, empowering the consumer to share their data with apps while eliminating the need to share credentials. We quickly took a leadership role in establishing direct access agreements with FIs to enable direct API connections for data sharing.
Our signed data access agreements (DAAs) with many of the nation’s largest FIs, credit card companies, and wealth management institutions means that 63% of our open banking platform traffic is completed through direct API access. We expect that traffic share to grow to more than 80% by the close of 2021.
Fintechs can easily receive the highest quality, structured data through direct API connections to their customer’s bank accounts. This data allows them to have better insights into what they’re doing, whether they’re providing those analytics to their customers, lending them money, or helping them make payments, open accounts or improve their credit scores.
How easy is it for consumers to connect their bank accounts to Finicity’s solutions?
Consumers can easily permission data from their bank accounts with Finicity Connect, making the consumer permissioning process simple and fast with just a few clicks. For example, a customer may allow their accounting app to automatically receive their account transactions or they could allow a review of their cash flow to establish a line of credit to grow their business—all in a matter of minutes.
How can I integrate with Finicity’s APIs?
If you’re ready to test Finicity’s data you can sign up for a developer account, or if you’re looking to see for yourself how Finicity’s open banking platform can transform your business, request a demo to talk with a representative about your specific use case.
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