After its failed takeover of Plaid, Visa has just acquired Swedish fintech Tink for 1.8 billion euros. The American payment giant thus gains a foothold in the booming open banking market.
Open banking, a flourishing market
Founded in 2012, Swedish fintech Tink has rapidly become one of the leaders in the open banking market. It has taken advantage of the second European Payment Services Directive (PSD2), adopted in 2015 by the European Parliament.
PSD2 obliges banks to give third-party suppliers access to their customer data, with the latter's consent, via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
This access to customer data enables fintechs to develop new payment services for banks or other fintechs. Tink has developed a platform for account aggregation and payment initiation, enabling financial institutions to offer new services or integrate new functionalities into their applications.
Numerous partnerships
Swedish fintech Tink has forged numerous partnerships since its creation, from mobile payments fintech Lydia in late 2020 to startup Papernest, which offers customers a single platform to centralize all their administrative formalities when moving house.
Tink is also a partner of SEB, BNP Paribas Fortis and Swedish fintech Klarna, a specialist in online payments. It currently employs 400 people and its platform is used by over 3,400 financial institutions, representing 250 million customers across Europe.
For Visa, the acquisition of Tink will accelerate "innovation in open banking for the benefit of our joint customers and the citizens of the UK and EU, while investing in highly skilled technology jobs on the continent," said Visa Europe CEO Charlotte Hogg.
In January 2020, Visa had seen its planned acquisition of Plaid, a Californian fintech also specializing in open banking, suspended by the US competition authorities following an antitrust investigation by the US Department of Justice.