GoCardless Gets Open Banking With Nordigen Buy

Digital payment solution GoCardless is to acquire Nordigen, an open banking data provider. By merging, the companies connect the two pillars of open banking: account-to-account (A2A) payments (GoCardless) and account access (Nordigen).
The deal, announced on Friday July 1, is expected to close later this summer. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
According to the GoCardless press release that announced the news, Nordigen offers the widest account access coverage in Europe. By deploying Nordigen’s technology, GoCardless will be able to connect more than 2,300 banks in 31 countries to its A2A network.
The announcement is the latest move from GoCardless as it accelerates its open banking strategy. Over the past 18 months, the FinTech has launched two open banking products: Instant Bank Pay and Verified Mandates.
The agreement will strengthen GoCardless’ internal open banking connectivity. This will help the company expand its coverage and add new payment types such as variable recurring payments.
“The acquisition of Nordigen will take us to the next level. By cleverly 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,” said Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless. in a press release. “We believe this open access will drive experimentation, and it will create even more compelling use cases.”
Rolands Mesters, CEO of Nordigen, added: “At Nordigen, our mission is to help businesses around the world adopt and use open banking, enabling greater financial transparency and greater financial inclusion. We share GoCardless’s enthusiasm for the growth of open banking, and are delighted to partner with a group of people who not only share our passion for driving game-changing innovations in financial services, but will also help us to provide free access to open banking to a much wider audience.
Earlier this week, Nordigen announced that it has partnered with digital accounting service Acounto to provide transactional data for accounting operations.
The Acounto partnership is the second deal Nordigen has entered into with accounting software developers after partnering with Cashology in April.
More on this: Cashology and public banking firm Nordigen launch accounting platform
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