The European open banking platform Tink, and the payments technology provider Tribe, have together entered a channel partnership for open banking technology. The partnership will enable Tribe to combine its issuer and acquirer services, with payment initiation services (PIS) and account information services (AIS) powered by Tink.
Through Tribe’s technology platform, its UK customers will now be able to enjoy seamless access to traditional payment methods alongside open banking payments – with AIS services to follow. Through its issuer and acquirer processing platform, ISAAC, Tribe utilises the latest technology to enable banks, fintechs, and acquirers to select the payment modules that best serve their individual needs.
This new partnership follows Tink’s €85 million investment round at the end of 2020, to fuel the open banking platform’s expansion of payments services across Europe. During 2021 Tink is set to increase staff by 50%, adding 200 new recruits to its almost 400-strong current employees.
Many of these new employees will focus on doubling the fintech’s market presence for PIS services, by expanding operations to 10 European countries. Tink now processes around 1.5 million payment transactions per month, for clients including Swedish digital mailbox provider Kivra, used by 4 million adults among a total population of 10 million, and payment fintech Lydia, used by more than 5 million customers in France.
“Over 3 million consumers and businesses are already using open banking-enabled products in the UK alone. We’re keen to help our clients capitalise on this opportunity to build even more compelling propositions in this space. We strongly believe that Open Banking will play a huge part in enabling the frictionless and, eventually, invisible payment experiences of the future,” comments Alex Reddish, Chief Commercial Officer at Tribe.
“We’re committed to delivering the very best solutions, through in-house development and key partnerships, to help our clients deliver innovative payments propositions. Tribe was the first issuer processor to have launched initial compliance APIs for fintechs to harness the power of Open Banking without developing their own APIs and we’re keen to continue investing in further Open Banking functionality. That’s why we’re excited about our partnership with Tink; we can now offer easy access to broader opportunities through a market-leading partner.”
Rafa Plantier, Head of UK & Ireland at Tink, added “We’re proud to partner with Tribe to help give more businesses access to innovative payment solutions. The advancements in mobile payments in recent years, combined with the strong development of open banking infrastructure and regulation, makes it more compelling for payment providers to adopt open banking payments. Our aim is to be the backbone of payments services providers across Europe, to enable inclusive, streamlined, fast-settlement, low-cost payments solutions.”
