Tink, an ‘open banking’ startup based in Stockholm, Sweden, has announced the addition of $103 million (€85 million) in its latest fundraising round. The funding has put the company’s post-money valuation at around $825 million.
According to TechCrunch, ‘Open banking’ describes a new kind of financial services offering in which “services that might not have previously lived next to each other are now joined up by way of APIs.”
With the money raised in this latest round, Tink plans to continue to expand its open banking network, adding banks and payment services throughout Europe. Currently, Tink reportedly acts as a link between 3400 banks that serve roughly 250 million people.
Its partners include PayPal, NatWest, ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Nordea, and SEB. Some of these are strategic investors in Tink: PayPal Ventures was one of the participants in the latest fundraising round, in addition to HMI Capital, Heartcore, ABN AMRO Ventures, Poste Italiane and Opera Tech Ventures.
“Despite the Difficulties of 2020, It Was a Year of Great Growth for Tink”
This latest fundraising round is Tink’s second-largest funding round of the year: in January, Tink announced the completion of a round worth €90 million ($105 million). At the time, the company was valued at €415 million ($503 million), and had roughly 2500 banking partners in its network.
Indeed, “despite the difficulties of 2020, it was a year of great growth for Tink,” said Daniel Kjellén, the company's Co-founder and Chief Executive, in a statement on the recent round.
“2020 has seen Payments powered by open banking take-off, and in 2021 we expect to see this scale – most prominently in the UK, followed by Europe. This funding extension will further facilitate the development of our payment initiation services across Europe, while continuing to deliver new data-products built on open banking technology to our customers.”
In addition to expanding its service network, Tink reportedly focused much of its efforts this year on enhancing its Cloud services. This is largely because of the spread of COVID-19, which made it difficult for people who usually bank, sell or shop in person to conduct business-as-usual. As a result, digitization has become more important than ever.
Perhaps this is why Zoé Fabian, Managing Director of Eurazeo Growth, said in a recent statement that: “the open banking movement continues to pick up pace, with 2021 showing every sign that it will bring increased collaboration between fintechs and large enterprises, who want to take digitally-enabled services to their customers with a tried and trusted partner.”
Unit, another open banking startup, recently popped onto the scene with $18.6 million in funding. Like Tink, Unit is also working to integrate banking features (and banks themselves) into new environments.
