Spain was a natural progression for Yapily, due to the Spanish fintech ecosystem growing tremendously over the last 12 months. With more than 400 fintechs, Spain is home to many innovative companies such as Coverfy, fintonic and Bnext. There is a clear appetite for innovation and we want to be able to support the needs of these ideas and products.

Similarly to the UK and Netherlands, Spain is also launching its own fintech sandbox environment to create financial innovation and attract international competitiveness and investment. This furthers the commitment to supporting the new wave of financial products and services that Open Banking will support.

Many of the big banks in Spain use a third party API provider for their PSD2 AIS and PIS coverage. We have integrated with this API provider as a whole, giving access to PSD2 API endpoints for 48 of the biggest banks in Spain, including BBVA, Santander, Caixa and Sabadell. This combination of integrations allows us to provide access to over 80% of consumer bank accounts.

The Spanish banks we have integrated with, all use a pre-authorisation element in their authorisation flow, which is a brand new requirement to the other banks we have implemented across the UK and Europe. To simplify this for our customers we have normalised the journey by putting the new authorisation requirements into two clear steps, and rolling it up into a new pre-authorisation feature, attributed to all institutions requiring this pre-authorisation step. This will allow fintechs and businesses to access both payment initiation and account aggregation services in a secure and streamlined way, in the Spanish consumer account market.

There are many more exciting updates to come, we’re currently working on extending our integration coverage in France.