At Yapily we are playing our part in delivering better and fairer financial infrastructure in many different markets, and we are delighted to announce that we are now live in the Netherlands.

A fintech boom

It’s an exciting time to be arriving in the territory, with Amsterdam recently ranked the third best city in Europe for start-ups, and the Netherlands’ fintech sector as a whole now ranking as both the second largest overall and third for VC funding across the EU.

It’s also growing at a furious pace: the top twenty Dutch fintech firms now employ 4,000 people, which represents a huge 25% increase on 2018. The country is also a hotbed of innovation in the burgeoning green finance sector – which is only going to become more important as the global business community manages the transition to a low-carbon economy.

There are almost too many exciting companies to name. Here are just a few that attracted significant investment in 2019:

• Brand New Day raised €25M to build a digital pensions platform
• Mollie raised €25M for an easy-to-integrate payments solution
• Geophy, a proptech valuation platform, raised €33M

As we – hopefully - start to emerge into a post-Covid world, there couldn’t be a better time for us to arrive on Dutch shores.

Expansive coverage

We’re very proud of our 100% PSD2 compliant coverage, which we have already extended to various key banks and financial institutions in the Netherlands that collectively make up 80% of the market.

We’d like to flag in particular two areas where we are already live.

We have onboarded banking giant ING – which has 38.4 million customers worldwide – and core national player ABN Amro – with 4 million users in the Netherlands – onto both our Account Information Services (AIS) and our Payment Initiation Service (PIS) solutions.

AIS grants them both real-time visibility on a vast amount of account balance, identity and transaction data. At the same time, PIS delivers seamless connectivity for account-to-account payments, instant settlement, and the ability to smoothly integrate services into third-party platforms without incurring interchange charges.

We’re not just working with the giants – existing Yapily clients using our coverage in the Netherlands include Intuit Quickbooks and Airbank. This local knowledge means we have a deep understanding of the importance of standardisation and connectivity in the space.

In the past, large Dutch banks’ API standards could vary significantly, but happily the trend is now towards greater connectivity and interoperability.

In 2020, the Dutch Payments Association joined the Berlin Group, a pan-European standardisation initiative that we are actively engaging with – a hugely positive development that is already laying the foundations for further fintech expansion in the Netherlands.

At Yapily, we are proud of our role in this story, as we support European business in unlocking the potential of the data economy.

Where next?

As we move into Q4 and start thinking about 2022, we’re not content to rest on our laurels.

Next up, we’re planning on continuing our expansion, with the Nordics next on our European itinerary – watch this space!