Yapily to acquire finAPI in open banking consolidation move

Yapily plans to acquire finAPI, but the transaction is subject to regulatory approvals before it closes. Both companies have open banking solutions.

Yapily is growing its business in Germany with this move. The company says it is a multi-million dollar transaction.

Yapily is based in the U.K. and offers a single, unified open banking platform. Yapily has a low-level solution without a front-end interface. The developers have to code their own flow. The result is more control.

European PSD2 regulation requires banks to offer programming interfaces so that they can work better with third-party services. Thousands of banks are covered by Yapily, which focuses on officialAPI integrations. It doesn't rely on screen scrapers and private APIs.

Companies can use open banking to check the balance on a bank account and initiate payments directly from a bank account.

An open banking provider is also known as FinAPI. Schufa acquired a majority stake in finAPI in 2019. It has an application programming interface with coverage in Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. Yapily allows clients to obtain account information and initiate payments using an API.

The ability to verify the age and identity of a customer is offered by finAPI. This can be used to comply with KYC.

The company says it is the leader in the U.K., but it isn't active in Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. The company is going to become the leader in Germany with today's acquisition.

There are some product features that overlap between Yapily and finAPI. The two companies did not start in the same market.

Yapily works with many companies. ING, Datev, Swiss Life, ImmobilienScout 24 and Finanzguru are some of the clients.

This is a huge milestone for Yapily on our journey from disruptive startup to ambitious scale-up. Within three years of launch, we have grown our customer base and have the largest open banking payments volumes in Europe. Yapily founder and CEO Stefano Vaccino said in a statement that they can gain more speed, agility, and depth by working with finAPI.

Over the last year, Yapily and finAPI have processed a combined total of $39.5 billion in payments. Yapily will double its customer base with this acquisition.