The French company Lydia teams up with the Swedish open banking specialist Tink

The “open banking revolution” continues to whet the appetite of FinTech players. Among the latter, Sweden’s Tink and France’s Lydia have been particularly active since the beginning of the year. 

Tink, which allows banks and FinTech companies to enrich their financial services offer more quickly, has thus completed a $106.3 million (€90 million) financing round in January, which notably allowed it to acquire the Spanish company Eurobits Technologies, specialized in account aggregation. At the same time, Lydia raised $47.3 million (€40 million) in January as part of a financing round led by Chinese giant Tencent.

To accelerate its development on a European scale, Lydia has just entered into a partnership with Tink to benefit from its open banking platform and thus add new financial services for its users.

“Initially, Tink’s account aggregation and payment initiation services will be integrated into the application, with the following objectives: improve the way users connect their bank accounts to Lydia, manage transfer beneficiaries (retrieve beneficiaries from their banks, add new beneficiaries from Lydia), and initiate payments, all without leaving the application,” indicated Lydia.

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One more step to become a “meta-banking” application

Launched in 2013 by Antoine Porte and Cyril Chiche, the Lydia application has been popularized by its refund functionality between individuals. The Paris-based startup has since extended its scope by allowing users to group their bank accounts on a single application, make bank transfers, create online jackpot, schedule recurring payments or pay with their smartphone. 

To be remunerated, Lydia charges a commission of 1.9% of the amount collected on each transaction from merchants who accept payments via the application. At the beginning of 2018, the application also launched Lydia Premium, a paid offer (with no commission charged) that allows users to benefit from virtual cards for online payments and to have a Mastercard card that replaces all other bank cards.

To date, Lydia claims nearly 4 million users. And if the name of its application is now well anchored in current language, the company wants to go far beyond the simple exchange of money between friends to become a so-called “meta-banking” application that allows to access and manage from a single interface all its accounts and various banking services. An ambition made possible by the democratization of open banking, accelerated by the second European directive on payment services (DSP2).

The directive, which came into force in January 2018, aims to modernize payment services by obliging banks to make their customers’ data accessible via APIs, subject to their consent, to third-party companies such as Lydia. In addition to simplifying data sharing between the various players in the banking sector, open banking will enable consumers to build an ecosystem of à la carte services, perfectly adapted to their needs. And Lydia intends to become the platform centralizing all these services, with the help of Tink.

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(Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio via Pixabay)

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