Open Banking is transforming the way we do financial services, and Yapily is on a mission to provide the greatest coverage in France. So we’re pleased to announce that our API is now available for local fintechs and businesses in France, providing seamless and secure access to financial data and payment infrastructure. This enables companies to expand their offering to French customers, while leveraging the opportunities of Open Banking to create new and innovative products.

France is already home to more than 1,200 innovative fintech companies including the likes of Epsor, Joko and Pennylane. We expect to see continued growth in payment providers and accountancy software companies that will inevitably drive further use and adoption of Open Banking services. The potential is huge as we all navigate out of the pandemic, the need for further digitalisation is clear and Open Banking can pave the way to success for many businesses.

France uses the ‘STET’ API standard, which is not to be confused with neighbouring countries that use the Berlin Group standard. As it stands the STET API standard supports current accounts and credit cards. When we building out coverage in France we built specific solutions to support:

Pagination

There was no pagination implemented, so we’ve added our own solution. Effectively this meant putting pages into transaction responses for multiple pages of customer transactions, as opposed to having to call for pages of transactions separately. We also implemented a bespoke pagination for La Banque Postale. Typically La Banque Postale only returns 200 transactions for any 90 day period, but we have built functionality to check for this behaviour and then call for any additional transactions inside the given dates. This ensures that if there are more than 200 transactions present within a 90 day period they will all be returned to our clients.

Consent flow

The consent flows for various banks in France only have consent access for between 30mins - 24-hours rather than traditional 90 days. We have developed a technical solution to this, where we refresh the refresh token at the interval required, so we can always generate access tokens whenever we need them. This prevents the need for re-authentication within such short time periods.

Where next?

Now that we have developed great Open Banking connectivity in France, we will be looking to build our connectivity in Austria and into the Nordic regions!