London-based fintech unicorn GoCardless has acquired Nordigen, the makers of the API that provides PSD2 data connections to all major European banks. The purchase will see Nordigen’s innovative approach to open banking connectivity integrated into the GoCardless product offer. With the ability to provide customers with easy access to upwards of 2,300 banks in 31 countries GoCardless will officially take the crown when it comes to the widest coverage in Europe. The financials of the deal were not disclosed.
In an interview around this time last year, Nordignen co-founder Rolands Mesters explained in detail just what exactly the company does and where they fit in the market, “It's time to wipe out screen scraping in Europe. It's expensive and hacky. Banks have built amazing APIs to let people migrate their account information securely and without friction. Nordigen allows developers to connect to these bank APIs for free.”
Founded in 2011, 2022 has been a particularly noteworthy epoch in the company’s history. In early February they closed a $312 million Series G round led by Permira, a raise that was clearly aimed at Open Banking products development.
Since this time, the company has since introduced Verified Mandates, a service that assesses whether a new customer’s bank account details are genuine, thereby preventing fraud, and just last week rolled out Instant Bank Pay, a service that allows for the instant collection of one-time account-to-account payments.
If you’re starting to see just how valuable Nordigen’s services are to the further planned GoCardless product roadmap, you’re not alone.
“The Nordigen acquisition will take us to the next level. By intelligently combining free, state-of-the-art open banking connectivity with deep payment expertise, we can now offer open banking-as-a-service to any developer, partner or fintech,” explained GoCardless CEO and co-founder Hiroki Takeuchi. ”We believe this open access will lead to experimentation, and that will create even more compelling use cases. We’re excited to redefine what open banking can do with the talented Nordigen team now on board.”
Since 2016, Nordigen had raised $4.2 million from notable backers including Black Pearls VC, Inventure, Highgoal Capital, ID4 Ventures, Superangel, Calchas Holding, as well as angel Investors including Artis Kehris, Henry Nilert, Gerri Kodres, and Riivo Anton.
“We share GoCardless’s excitement about the growth of open banking, and we’re delighted to join forces with a group of people who not only share our passion for driving game-changing innovation in financial services, but will also help us bring free open banking access to a far wider audience,” concluded Mesters.
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