Press Release: Newly launched BankiFi takes banks and its business customers ‘Beyond Open’

Pocket Treasurer is first business solution on the BankiFi foundation, which hosts a suite of API driven micro services.

Manchester/Amsterdam, 24 January 2018 – Today BankiFi enters the market with its consent driven multi-bank aggregator platform that forms the foundation for a range of value add business banking solutions. The company, founded by Mark Hartley and Conny Dorrestijn, aims to ready banks and other financial institutions for a new open banking world order.

Societal and global regulatory changes form the basis for radical change in the current model of banking. Data and new technologies to distribute these appropriately – in an open, instant and relevant manner - form the basis for a new customer facing model for banking services. BankiFi aims to equip financial services providers with a consent centric platform that enables them to open up their business to external (fintech) partners in a way that is safe, easy to use, monitor and monetise. This way they can extend, in particular their business, customer relationships in a model that is financially sustainable and built for growth. The platform’s launching customer is Nordea’s Open Banking Developer Portal.

“We see a very realistic opportunity in working together with financial institutions to build this new banking world order. Interest income is coming down, banks recognise value add is the only way to build out the trust and relevance with their customers. These are the key ingredients required to create new sources of revenue built around ‘fee for service”, says Mark Hartley, founding partner at BankiFi. “We felt that in particular the business banking customer segment has been hard hit in the last years, so the first solution we launch on our platform is a Pocket Treasurer. We are obviously delighted to work with Nordea on this and future solutions to empower their Open Banking Platform.”

“Together with BankiFi, we have within a short time frame managed to come up with an innovative solution that will be of great interest for many of our customers and by that we have also proven that co-creation with third parties on the Open Banking platform will turbo charge our development of new products.  We see this as the first of several things that we can create together”, says Claus Richter, Head of CM Customer Solutions at Nordea.

The company is self-funded with additional co-creation resources from thestartupfactory.tech, a full circle tech and industry scale company in Manchester that builds reactive software applications adopting the latest micro services architecture, and also selects, trains and coaches IT experts for the dedicated BankiFi team and RedCompass, a London based advice and delivery firm to the international payments industry.

David Birch, renowned Author and Advisor, joins the Advisory Board: “Authentication, authorisation and consent are at the heart of fundamental change in the financial services industry. Given the complexity of the many sources of the data one can see that a level of standardisation around data and consent is a very real requirement. BankiFi’s approach to these issues is at the core of the platform and philosophy and as such I believe the vision of BankiFi to be a very realistic one with many opportunities for the longer term in areas such as identity and e-commerce”,

James S. Greene, Founder and Managing Director at Sky D Ventures, Inc. is the Chairman of the Board of BankiFi: “With PSD2 and the impending GDPR legislation one could be fooled into thinking this is a European market opportunity, but we see a similar drive towards a truly open and relevant customer experience for banks on a global scale. BankiFi offers a realistic and mature approach and technology for banks ‘who get it’, and I am excited to work with their experienced team in that space”.

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 About BankiFi | Beyond Open

BankiFi offers financial institutions a consent centric platform with business and corporate solutions that enables the banks to go ‘beyond an open experience’ promise with relevant offerings to their client base in terms of time, location and context. BankiFi consists of a data driven distributed banking model that allows financial service providers to manage, consume, distribute and monetise data through a suite of API driven micro services.

BankiFi and its solutions are offered as a managed service that can run either in a private or public cloud. This set of consumable services has been designed so as to store as little data as possible outside the bank environment. BankiFi combines the core strength of the bank – customer relationships and a regulated environment – with the fast, agile development skills of a robust FinTech partner.

This combination knows three winners: the bank which gets new net income and offers its customers a relevant business experience, reduced risk and lower cost of R&D and integration. Second the FinTech community who get an amazing developer experience and avoid the complexity of dealing with consent in their apps and thirdly the empowered customer who has access to relevant services and full data control.

The company operates out of the UK (Manchester) and the Netherlands (Amsterdam).

About Pocket Treasurer

Pocket Treasurer combines aspects of cash management with lending and pushes advice out to customers on the best way to manage and optimise their working capital.  The solution allows the bank that operates the Pocket Treasurer service to become the trusted advisor for their business customers.

About Mark Hartley

Mark Hartley has held a wide range of general management, sales, innovation and strategy roles in the technology industry for the financial services segment in the APAC region and Europe, most recently at Clear2Pay and FIS. A renowned innovator and thought leader on the subject of Payments & Open Banking, he currently serves as a strategic advisor on PSD2 and Open Banking to Nordea Group and is Advisor to the Board of Nationwide Building Society.

About Conny Dorrestijn

Conny Dorrestijn has worked in the international financial technology industry in a wide range of marketing and business development roles (Nixdorf, ACT, Clear2Pay, FIS) whilst at the same time developing study trips, projects and concepts around fintech and innovation. Speaking frequently at international events such as BAI, EBA and Money2020, she is also an Advisory Board Member to Holland FinTech and AdviceRobo, Associate of the Digital Insurance Agenda (DIA) and a Global Innovation Awards Judge at BAI (US).

More on www.bankifi.com

About David Birch

David G.W Birch is an internationally-recognised thought leader in digital identity and digital money, named one of the global top 15 favourite sources of business information by Wired magazine. He has advised organisations around the world and has a global perspective on digital financial services. His most recent book ‘Before Babylon and Beyond Bitcoin” is a must read for anyone working in innovation in finance, explaining how we move from physical money to digital assets ‘that understand us’.

About James S. Greene

Since 1980, Jim Greene has been serving the global financial services industry, working in leadership roles with Accenture, Cap Gemini, Cisco whilst also investing in, creating and incubating (fin)tech companies. He recently founded Sky D Ventures providing advisory services to financial services incumbents and disruptors, PE and VCs in FinTech and technology companies. A frequent speaker at industry events, he also hosts executive conferences to Silicon Valley, the base for his global activities. He is a Member of the Board and Advisory Board Member to a range of private and public companies.

About Nordea

Nordea is the largest financial services group in the Nordic region and a full-service universal bank with a total operating income of EUR 10 billion and total assets of EUR 616 billion in 2016. Nordea ranks as the third largest corporation in the Nordic region and one of the top 10 financial services companies in Europe based on market capitalisation. Nordea is present in 17 countries, including four home markets – Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It was the first bank in the Nordics and one of the first in Europe to launch an Open Banking Developer Portal. The shares of Nordea Bank AB (publ) are traded on the Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen stock exchanges.

Contact: conny.dorrestijn@bankifi.com or M +31 651 067201