__30th June 2020:__ Leading enterprise connectivity platform Yapily has today announced a new partnership with digital wealth manager Moneyfarm, to provide its UK and Italian customers with a frictionless deposit process between their investment portfolios and bank accounts. 

By integrating Yapily’s [open banking API](https://yapily.com), Moneyfarm customers will be able to securely deposit into or withdraw funds directly from their investment portfolios; providing a more convenient and enhanced customer experience. 

Moneyfarm is a digital wealth management platform that delivers a smart and simple way for anyone to invest their money. The new integration means Moneyfarm users can start investing from Italian and UK bank accounts into their investment accounts, without delay, to gain immediate access to the platform's wealth advice and management. 

The use of Yapily’s platform highlights Moneyfarm’s commitment to harnessing the latest open banking technology to improve its customers’ experience and ability to make informed investments. 

The partnership further highlights Yapily’s position across Europe as the leading [Open Banking infrastructure provider](https://yapily.com), enabling partners to take advantage of the benefits that open finance can deliver. This includes greater control of finances, as well as an improved, seamless experience across different financial products.   

__Giovanni Dapra, CEO of Moneyfarm__ said: “We’ve seen a sizable shift towards open banking, and the benefits that it brings to all our customers in terms of enabling them to make better financial decisions. Yapily’s API technology is unrivalled, and its coverage across Europe is extensive, so this partnership provides us with a scalable solution for customers when making deposits. This contributes hugely to our mission to empower investors globally to make confident choices, so they can create a more financially secure future for themselves.”

__Stefano Vaccino, CEO of Yapily__ said: “We’re proud to see our infrastructure fuelling exciting growth within a number of financial service sectors across Europe. Through partnerships with innovative and customer-focused platforms such as Moneyfarm, we are removing the barriers to services such as wealth management to a wider demographic. This approach is paving the way to a world of greater financial control and wellbeing, enabled by open banking, for all. We look forward to building a long partnership where we can build towards greater access to financial freedom.”

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__About Yapily:__
Yapily is an enterprise connectivity platform, enabling companies to seamlessly access users’ financial data. Powering a new era of financial services, Yapily empowers people around the world to receive faster, affordable and personalised products. The company has raised $18.4m funding to date, and over the last six months monthly recurring revenue has grown over 500%.

__About Moneyfarm:__
Founded in 2011 by Paolo Galvani and Giovanni Daprà, Moneyfarm is an international asset management company with a digital approach, specializing in medium-long term investments. With offices in London, Milan, Cagliari and Frankfurt and a team of 130 professionals, Moneyfarm manages the assets of over 45,000 savers (on a basis of over 300,000 active users) at a rate of growth that has always been double-digit year on year. Thanks to the use of digital technologies, Moneyfarm has developed an innovative model that allows it to provide an independent consultancy service and top-quality, simple, transparent and cost-effective asset management at lower costs than those offered by traditional managers. It is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and supervised in Italy by Consob. The company has as main partners the Allianz group, Poste Italiane, the investment funds Cabot Square Capital, United Ventures, Endeavor and the Sardinia Foundation and is today one of the most financed innovative companies in Italy with a total of over 115 million euros of funding obtained. The company has also entered into important commercial partnerships with Poste Italiane and with Banca Sella in Italy and with Allianz Global Investors in Germany, which sanctioned the expansion of the service also to the B2B2C segment. For more info see www.moneyfarm.com


Moneyfarm and Yapily enable seamless investment journey for European users

Moneyfarm and Yapily partnership announcement - Open Banking

[Open banking](https://yapily.com) relies on the availability of financial data, which arrives in many shapes and sizes. Adding bank connections is one thing, but increasingly, clients are demanding more from Open Banking; to derive meaning and insights from transactional data.

A cornerstone of this is the ability to categorise transactions into income and expense categories. By creating and utilising services like these, our clients can seek to better understand their customer’s financial behaviors. 

In this categorisation series, we share top tips and the challenges faced when we embarked on our journey to develop Yapily’s categorisation engine. 

## The “Product” behind the Product  

You never know how big something is until you start building it. This is definitely true when we embarked on our journey to build our Categorisation Engine. Being a relatively new Product Manager for Machine Learning products, it was a steep learning curve for me.

The journey to develop this product was as much about developing individual parts of a larger system as well as the end result. After initial scoping sessions, we found what we actually needed to design was: 

- A system to develop Transaction Categorisation Models. 
- Our first model: to target UK Retail transactions. 

This first point is particularly important for a business like [Yapily](https://yapily.com) - a financial gateway that will need to serve multiple markets and therefore will need to handle financial data from a variety of sources. The requirement is as much about building a scalable process to deliver multiple categorisation models for potential future challenges. 

Given this was our first step, it quickly became apparent that success hinged on us developing our core competencies or “Products behind the Product” that can be re-used or extended alongside our final deliverable - a Categorisation Engine for UK Retail Banks. 

- Data Treatment 
- Data Classification 
- Model Training 

__Data Treatment:__ 

Varying quality of data from the banks and finding a core set of features from which we could build our Machine learning Models was our first challenge. Given that we were targeting the UK for our first release the Open Banking Spec went some way towards solving this problem, but given the number of optional fields and the subtle differences between what was returned by each bank presented a challenge. 

The second challenge was the removal of Personal Information from transactional data before we classified it. Ensuring that only anonymised data is accessible to our internal teams for classification.  
 
__Data Classification:__

Having experimented with both manual and automatic ways of classifying transactions, it became clear that manually classified data was far better at training our model. Given the size of the task - we developed a lightweight tool that enabled us to crowdsource labellers from “willing” participants at Yapily - eventually running a series of Labelling Grand Prix at work to create training sets from anonymised transactional data.

__Model Training:__

Having recently watched “The Professor and the Madman” (I’d highly recommend this as mid week COVID Movie Fodder to fill up an evening), it drew striking similarities between their task and ours. In the film - a group of professors embark on the daunting task of creating the first English Dictionary. Quickly they come to the same conclusion that we did - “the work would never be finished”. 

> “Building a Categorisation engine is much like writing the dictionary, it’s work is never truly done” 

Once we had got to our first milestone it quickly became apparent that models require re-training and constant optimisation, new merchants can appear at any time and new categories of spending may appear. As a result, the Data and Insights team needed to invest in tooling and opted to use Kubeflow to help us continue to refine our model. 

### What did we learn?  

__For me personally, I took three main lessons from this experience:__ 

Thinking of the Product more as a system, with component parts and applying systems thinking principles really helped us plan the Product roadmap for our initial delivery. This also helped us identify common components that we could use again, if Yapily decided to develop a categorisation model for another market. 

Secondly, deciding on a Taxonomy by which we can classify transactions into various categories was extremely contentious. Some of the common problems we ran into:

- Different people segment their spend differently.
- Even when giving people a finite choice of categories, there are still differences in how people categorise transactions.
- Organising spend into categories is difficult e.g. how do you categorise a trip to the post office?


After much trial and error, adapting card sorting exercises and lots of testing, we arrived at a taxonomy that made sense to us.

Finally, was the importance of data. To continue the theme of film references, Robert Downey Jr (when playing Sherlock Holmes) summarises our first key learning nicely “Data, Data, Data - I cannot make bricks without clay”.  Obtaining data to train our model that is good quality and diverse was a huge problem to solve. As well as controlling for diversity of transactions, we had a larger business problem: how do we classify data at scale, not just now but in the future? 

The answer came in the form of developing our labelling tool into its own stand alone product that can allow us to develop a product that started out as a solution to a problem into what I believe is a competitive advantage for Yapily. 

### What’s next?

This is a really exciting time for Yapily and Data Science. If you look at the rate at which Banks are producing [Open Banking](https://yapily.com/what-is-open-banking) APIs across UK and Europe combined with the improved quality of data compared to screen scraping -  this space really lends itself towards Machine Learning and AI Enrichments.

The most exciting use case from my perspective, is in the lending sector. The combination of the quality Open Banking API Data and an accurate categorisation model can be extremely powerful in lending decisions and presents a win-win situation: ultimately 

Customers benefit by getting a more tailored lending decision 
Businesses benefit by being able to lend more confidently lend or are able to service customer segments that they couldn’t previously

In terms of where we can take Categorisation at Yapily, model refinement and using that for enrichment purposes is what I find most interesting. Understanding how often a payment occurs and the type of transaction it is, is just one example where combining enrichment services can offer real insight into our customers.


How to develop a scalable categorisation engine for open banking

Developing a successful and scalable categorisation engine is difficult and we have documented some of the lessons learnt while developing ours for open banking.

__London, UK, 6th April 2020:__ Leading enterprise connectivity platform Yapily has today announced that it has raised $13m in a Series A funding round. The fintech will use the investment to drive [open banking](https://yapily.com) adoption by organisations across Europe; providing a strong, secure and powerful connectivity layer that enriches customer experiences and creates financial opportunity.  

The investment was led by Lakestar, an early investor in Skype, Spotify, Airbnb and Facebook as well as one of Europe’s biggest fintechs - Revolut. Existing investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and LocalGlobe also participated in the round. 

Angel investors also include Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise chairman and co-founder), Ott Kaukver (Twilio’s CTO), Roberto Nicastro (UniCredit’s former deputy CEO) and Frank Strauss (Former CEO of Deutsche Postbank). 

The new funding comes during a highly successful period for the London-based fintech, in the last six months its monthly recurring revenue has grown by over 500%; quadrupled its headcount in London to 45; and expanded into Italy, Ireland and France, as it works towards total market coverage in Europe, with new territories added regularly.  

> The UK is at the epicentre of the world’s [open finance](https://www.yapily.com/blog/3-examples-of-what-open-finance-can-do-right-now/) movement

With the UK at the centre of open banking innovation and development, today’s investment announcement shows significant market confidence in Yapily. With more than 6,000 banks affected by the [PSD2](https://www.yapily.com/blog/psd2-screenscraping-apis/) deadline, most European countries are set to release quality APIs publicly in 2020. Open banking technology is also being adapted to other aspects of financial services as part of open finance. The new funding will be used by Yapily to consolidate its position in Europe as the backbone of open banking, and the infrastructure that partners need in order to take advantage of open finance. 

Yapily offers a proprietary open API that enables companies to access the financial information needed to meet rising customer expectations in banking, lending, payments, accounting and money management. It boasts Fortune 500 companies and fast growth fintechs as clients, including Intuit QuickBooks, where Yapily’s API is used by the accounting software provider to help thousands of its SME customers access insights and financial information from bank accounts in UK, France & Ireland. Other customers and partners of Yapily include IBM and GoCardless. 

Yapily also collaborates with technical design authorities and regulators, such as Open Banking Implementation Entity in the UK and Berlin Group. 

__Stefano Vaccino, Founder and CEO of Yapily, said:__ “We believe open banking is a force for good. Using our API and infrastructure, we’re not only providing our partners with strong and powerful connectivity to boost their user experiences. But we’re also giving their customers, whether they be consumers or businesses, greater control of their finances, through the creation of products and services which can fuel greater financial management and accessibility. Something that’s more essential than ever during this period of uncertainty. 

The UK is at the epicentre of the world’s open finance movement, with the industry setting the rules as the world begins to embrace their own open banking positions. We’re pleased to be at the centre of this growth - we’re backed by experienced investors, and we're the only technical provider trusted and chosen by regulators and technical committees. With this funding we intend to drive open banking adoption and its benefits, ensuring benefits are far reaching within the likes of payments, accounting, lending and beyond.”

__Stephen Nundy, Partner at Lakestar, said:__ “With pressure placed on the world's economy due to the Covid-19 outbreak, we believe investors have an important role to play in continuing to support innovation to fuel business growth. Now has never been a more important time to drive financial wellbeing and goodwill, and Yapily’s infrastructure is best placed to enable and encourage this across the financial ecosystem.”

“With Yapily, we’re investing in market leading technology that is ahead of the competition, both in terms of seamlessness to the end user, and in security and control. Their "Open API first" approach, with no screen scraping or reverse engineering of functionality, ensures all parties are getting the performance, scale, and security expected of such a critical piece of API infrastructure."

"Stefano and his growing team have deep technical and regulatory expertise, they’re very ambitious, and we look forward to accelerating Yapily’s business growth.”


__Ola Malomo, Head of Bank Partnerships at Intuit QuickBooks, said:__ “By plugging Yapily’s API directly into our platform, we’re able to offer our SME customers a smooth and simple way to access their financial information, unlocking real-time insights into their cashflow. We look forward to working with Yapily as the company continues to thrive.”



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__About Yapily__

Yapily is an enterprise connectivity platform, enabling companies to seamlessly access users’ financial data. Powering a new era of financial services, Yapily empowers people around the world to receive faster, affordable and personalised products. The company has raised $18m funding to date, and over the last six months monthly recurring revenue has grown over 500%.



__About Lakestar__

Lakestar is one of Europe's leading venture capital firms investing in technology companies led by exceptional entrepreneurs. The team’s early investments included Skype, Spotify, Facebook and airbnb. Since raising a first fund in 2013, Lakestar manages an aggregated volume of over EUR 1bn across three early stage funds, and more recently a growth fund. 
The company has expanded and broadened its portfolio and holds investments in the likes of Opendoor, Oscar, GYG, Glovo, Sennder, Eigen, FiveAI, Revolut and Hometogo to name a few. Lakestar has presence in Berlin, Zurich and London.

Lakestar helps companies to identify new markets and expand into them rapidly, with a focus on the US and Europe. The team advises and supports portfolio companies in business development, recruitment, technology and marketing. The investments range from early stage companies to those in their growth stage.
Visit us on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lakestar-vc/) and our website [www.lakestar.com](https://www.lakestar.com)


Yapily raises $13m in Series A funding to drive the global open finance revolution 

Yapily raises $13m in Series A funding to drive the global open finance revolution. Yapily is leading the adoption of open finance and open banking, empowering people around the world to receive faster, affordable and personalised financial products.

__Talk to me about your life in India__

“I’m from Northern India, in a city called Karnal, which is also the birthplace of female astronaut, Kalpana Chawla!”

Mum always wanted me to be a Teacher, she recognised early on that I knew how to control and manage situations. I used this skill to some degree when I taught Mathematics at University. But what I really wanted to do was solve problems and become an engineer”.

__Describe a QA Engineer and how did you get into it?__

“A Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer rolls out and thoroughly tests the product for the customer, giving complete assurance that it delivers what they need. You need to put yourself in the end-user shoes and understand how they are using the product. From here, I always plan for different scenarios and create preventative measures and processes. 

Similar rules apply for Yapily, by thoroughly testing all bank integrations and ensuring all parties comply with open banking standards to deliver the best functionality and quality connectivity.”

__What was it like moving away from India and working in the UK?__

“India demanded longer working and commuting hours. My role involved speaking with global clients, on a daily basis, covering different time zones. When I moved to the UK, I found there is a better work-life balance here. There is also the advantage of the UK being closer to Europe, which was my dream destination.”

> Within three months, I’ve tested integrations with multiple banks, improving the overall quality of the product. 


__What has your overall experience been like at Yapily?__

“I love it here, the team is empowering and welcoming. I’m not afraid to ask anyone a question or provide input, and because of this, I feel valued. 

Within three months, I’ve tested integrations with multiple banks, improving the overall quality of the product. I’ve had feedback that customers feel confident that I will catch anything before it actually happens!”

__You are always smiling and have a demanding role. What’s your secret?__

“Coming from multiple experiences in development, testing, and support, I’m used to ‘critical’ response environments. I’ve trained myself to be calm in these situations and learnt to wear a smile and face the problem.” 

__What’s a proud moment for you?__

“Having 2 job offers, at the same time, when I moved to the UK.”


Open stories with Niharika: wear a smile and solve problems 

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Moneyfarm and Yapily enable seamless investment journey for European users

How to develop a scalable categorisation engine for open banking

Yapily raises $13m in Series A funding to drive the global open finance revolution

Open stories with Niharika: wear a smile and solve problems