Stockholm: Swedish fintech startup Open Payments has raised a €3 million seed round. Leading the round is Industrifonden, existing investors Brightly Ventures, Luminar Ventures, and angel investors also participated. The funds will be used to continue to grow the team and establish the platform in the Nordic and European market.
Founded in 2017, Open Payments is one of the leading open banking platforms in the Nordic region. It offers PSD2 (Payment Services Directive regulation) compliant API aggregation, and enables businesses to easily and efficiently integrate with banks and other financial services. All in all, the platform allows third-party providers and business partners to develop their own products and services under their own brand-name and still own their user journey. Furthermore, Open Payments aims to create an ecosystem, where third-party providers and business partners will further enhance the development of the platform going forward.
The startup is positioned somewhere between the traditional fintech and ‘bigtech’ business models. Open Payments is licensed by the FSA to provide financial services, and the platform itself is more towards a ‘bigtech’ model, with its openness and modularity. The platform not only provides open APIs, but also extensibility, openness and modularization for businesses and developers to build their unique customer offerings.
“I believe that BigTechs will have a big impact on how we perform financial services in the future, but also requires traditional FinTechs, and by bridging the gap between them, we have a great position to offer our customers a flexible solution”, says Jonas Kjellin, Founder and CEO at Open Payments.
So far, Open Payments has launched its services in Sweden and Finland with a strong customer base that has built their open banking solutions leveraging Open Payments Platform. The startup plans to continue expanding into more markets across the Nordics and EU by the end of the year.
Open Payments also closed a pre-seed investment of around €125K last year, in May 2019. It intends to use the new round of funding to also grow the team, expand the platform and further enable Open banking in the Nordic and European markets.
“Open Payments platform makes it easy for companies to take advantage of the enormous business development potential that Open Banking entails for small and large companies. It is also exciting to find such a strong founding team with long international experience here in the small Swedish market. I look forward to work with a young, agile company that with ingenious technical simplicity gives customers favourable freedom and flexibility in their open banking offerings”, says Anna Ljungdahl, Investment Manager at Industrifonden.
