When the doors opened

Within the space of a year, so much progress has been made in open banking. The team loved catching up with old friends and new faces to lead the open banking conversation and share what Yapily has been up to.

From the moment the doors opened, the venue was abuzz as everybody became reacquainted. Among a number of powerful conversation themes, there was an outstanding lineup of 380 industry speakers - including our very own CEO Stefano, and Chief Product Officer Roland!

PSD2 provides a lucrative opportunity for banks

Our CEO, Stefano, hit the stage with Vyne’s Tom MacGregor, Tink’s Tom Pope, and J.P. Morgan’s Basak Toprak to discuss how banks can monetise open banking.

From open banking infrastructure providers like Yapily to account and payment initiation service providers (AISPs or PISPs), new players are entering the payments landscape and shaking up the status quo. With more providers entering the market to make the most of what open banking has to offer, the monopoly on financial information and control of transactions is over.

However, this doesn’t mean that open banking has to mean the end of a particular revenue stream for banks. PSD2 provides a huge opportunity for banks, allowing them to better support their customers while improving speed, reducing costs, decreasing defaults, and ultimately offering more personalised solutions.

“People often think about retail banking and current accounts when, in actual fact, banks can be many things to many people.

Banks are lenders, payment processors, brokers - the list goes on. To support the needs of their customers, open banking is instrumental to improve speed, reduce cost, decrease defaults, and ultimately offer more tailored products and services to customers.

In my opinion, the ecosystem needs to adopt a shift in mindset. Monetisation is about so much more than simply charging for premium APIs. Open banking is a mechanism that can enable banks to increase market share, improve competitiveness, and gain better insights into their customers.” - Stefano Vaccino

Discussion: What can banks and fintechs do to improve the lives of SMEs?

We all know that small business owners have enough on their plates - especially over the last few years - without having to deal with onerous bookkeeping and finance tasks.

On day three, an important discussion took place that looked at how banks and fintechs can collaborate to enable seamless financial experiences for businesses.

Yapily’s CPO, Roland Selmer, joined forces with Comma’s Becky Danks, Silicon Valley Bank’s David McHenry and FinTech Alliance’s Olivia Minnock to explore how banks and fintechs can collectively work together to streamline financial processes and make life easier for SMEs at long last.

This session outlined how a chance meeting at Money20/20 in 2021 formed the basis of a relationship between a bank and a fintech to raise the bar in service deliverables for SMEs.

Working in close partnership with Yapily, Comma has simplified the complex bulk payments process through the power of open banking. Yapily’s infrastructure provides Comma with the API connection they need to build a reliable, secure, and scalable bulk payments feature for SMEs.

Since partnering with Yapily, Comma has:

• Processed over £12 million in payments through open banking.
• Automated payments to over 10,000 suppliers and employees, saving the end-users both time and money
• Improved efficiency, reducing the time their customers spend processing payments every month by 77%

Find out more about how Yapily and Comma work together to support underserved SMEs.

Embedded finance remains an untapped opportunity

With an estimated $3.5 trillion addressable market size by 2030, embedded finance was another hot topic at Money 20/20 this year. Particularly when considering how it remains an outsized opportunity for retailers and e-commerce.

Demand for embedded finance and open banking solutions is growing at a meteoric rate. 92% of business leaders are planning on launching embedded finance within the next five years. UK Finance data shows that between September 2020 and 2021, open banking payments increased more than 500% in 12 months from 0.5 million to 2.6 million transactions.

Announcing our partnership with OpenPayd to unleash embedded finance potential

Together with OpenPayd, we’re addressing this demand by integrating Yapily’s open banking platform into OpenPayd’s embedded finance offering, creating a complete banking and payments ecosystem through a single API.

It’s an incredibly exciting time for open banking and embedded finance, so we were thrilled to announce our partnership at Money 20/20. Following the announcement, we enjoyed celebrating the news with our friends at OpenPaydl!

Looking forward to next year!

As Money 20/20 wraps up for another year, we can’t help but look toward what next year has to bring. Open banking was one of the hottest topics at this year’s event as several talks referenced the journey of open banking in Europe. As the open banking revolution continues to unfold, the conversation is bound to get hotter. Roll on 2023