Open banking fintech Yapily raises $13M Series A

via TechCrunch

Yapily, one of a number of fintech startups that offer an opening banking API to let enterprises, such as financial service providers and merchants, connect to banks, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Lakestar, which is also a backer of fintech unicorn Revolut.

Existing investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, and LocalGlobe also participated. Yapily last disclosed $5.4 million in seed funding in May 2019, and counts the likes of Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise chairman and co-founder), Ott Kaukver (Twilio’s CTO), Roberto Nicastro (UniCredit’s former deputy CEO) and Frank Strauss (Former CEO of Deutsche Postbank) as angel backers.

Founded in mid 2017 by ex-Goldman Sachs employee Stefano Vaccino, Yapily’s open banking platform makes it easier for various service providers to connect to banks. Specifically, it provides a way to retrieve financial data and initiate payments via a “single secure API” that in turn connects to each supported bank’s open API.

Customers are said to include Fortune 500 companies and fast growth fintechs, including Intuit QuickBooks, where Yapily’s API is used by the accounting software provider to help SMEs access insights and financial information from bank accounts in the U.K., France, and Ireland. Another customer of Yapily is GoCardless, the London fintech that makes it easy to offer customers the option to pay by direct debit.

More broadly, Yapily’s platform can be used by anything from accountancy firms, companies in the payment space, to crypto currency providers, digital wealth applications and e-commerce companies.

To that end, the open banking fintech says it will use the investment to “drive open banking adoption by organisations across Europe,” noting that more than 6,000 banks will be affected by the PSD2 (European open banking) deadline. This means that most European countries are set to release open banking-style APIs publicly in 2020, which Yapily hopes to benefit from.