1.Can you tell us more about Tink and what your role as Senior Business Manager entails?

Tink is Europe’s leading open banking platform that enables banks, fintechs and startups to build smart digital financial services for their end users. Our mission is to enable data-driven financial services that delight both our customers and our customers’ customers. Tink has been paving the way for more customer-centric financial services since it was founded in 2012 by our CEO Daniel Kjellén and CTO Fredrik Hedberg. By enabling our customers to access financial data on behalf of their customers, we allow them to focus on the development of their core business idea, bringing their vision to life, and ultimately creating better user experiences. We do this by removing all of the complexity and providing seamless authentication flows for customers of practically any bank in Europe, with just one line of code.

Our technology powers some of the world’s leading banks and fintechs, including PayPal, Klarna, NatWest, ABN AMRO and BNP Paribas. Tink has more than 270 employees and we are headquartered in Stockholm but serve our customers out of 11 local offices across Europe. In my role as Senior Business Manager I am heading up Tink’s ecosystem for global partners and I am also responsible for business development here in the GCC region. For the GCC region we currently offer our data products – Personal Finance Management and Data Enrichment – that allow local banks and fintechs to grasp the opportunities that open banking presents and use our technology to build truly personalized financial products that deepens the relationship with the user.

2. What does open banking mean and how has Europe embraced this concept?

It is the shift where the financial services market — like many other industries and markets — goes from closed to open and from analogue to digital. This shift is pushed by both end-user
demand and by EU legislation. In short it means that essentially anyone — banks, fintechs and startups — now has the possibility to create new types of creative and user-friendly financial
products and services. In 2019 we conducted a survey targeting financial executives across 17 European markets, focusing on attitudes about open banking. The results from our survey – “Inside the minds of Europe’s bankers” – revealed that 64% of the respondents believe that the financial industry will significantly evolve as a result of open banking. The survey also shows that a majority of the respondents are positive towards open banking. As I see it, the open banking journey has only just started. During 2019 the focus across Europe was about ensuring compliance, which, for obvious reasons, was needed. Now, we are seeing a big change in the dialogues we are having with banks as they are now getting a first-hand experience of how it is to be a customer using the APIs. We strongly believe that 2020 will be about having customer centricity and thus continued improvements are expected that will benefit the end-users.

3. Please tell us more about the Grip app and account aggregation.

In a few short years, ABN AMRO’s standalone personal finance management app – Grip – has boomed. Launched on top of the Tink platform in 2015, Grip has racked up over 750,000 downloads to become the top-ranked personal finance management app in the Netherlands. But as our aim is to always work closely with our customers and continuously push for developing their products further, we recently helped our long-term partner ABN AMRO to make the popular Grip even more open and relevant. This was done by allowing users to view account information from several other banks – all in one place. The Dutch bank is one of the first retail banks in the Netherlands to launch this feature, known as multi-banking, which was built using our account aggregation technology. The new service is especially useful to the many Grip users who hold accounts with more than one bank. For example, a customer of both ABN AMRO and Rabobank won’t have to switch between different banking apps to see their account balances. Based on the added information, Grip can give users a better overview of their finances.

In addition, this added feature also makes Grip available to a much bigger market. By exposing other banks inside the Grip app, the app opens up for non-ABN AMRO customers for the first time – attracting potentially millions more people into its orbit. Through its open bankingpowered app, ABN AMRO is not just bringing more value and financial insight to customers – it’s also showcasing how opening up to the wider ecosystem can result in a new generation of personalized banking products.

4. The number of your customers have quadrupled in 2019. Can you tell us more about that and the kind of customer experience you are developing in Tink?

Yes, and I think we’re just getting started! Besides managing to quadruple the number of enterprise customers in 2019, our selfservice platform that targets developers is now counting over 4,600 registered users, up by more than 200% year-overyear. Few people outside Sweden know this, but Tink was originally founded with the launch of a consumer app in Sweden – downloaded by more than 500,000 users. During our years as a consumer company, we have learned that the future of mobile banking is not a features game, it is an engagement game. Today our personal finance management technology aims to educate users about their finances, empower them to make smarter decisions and, ultimately, achieve financial happiness. We do this by providing our customers the tools to quickly build intuitive, personalized, and beautiful user experiences. From an enterprise perspective, our personal finance management technology can be used to match the bank customers needs and demands with the right offering. As I see it, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to personal finance management. The relationship between a bank and its customers rests on a foundation of trust and therefore the personal finance management experience should too. Ultimately — and this is what we tell all of our customers — it is all about having the users’ best interest at heart.

5. What advice can you give to aspiring entrepreneurs and startups in the tech field?

Partner with us! We are here to provide the technology and knowledge needed to enable banks and fintechs in the GCC region to build customer-oriented personal finance management apps and tools. We at Tink believe that any business that can provide value should be able to access financial data with the customer’s consent, and leverage the power of technology to offer great financial products and services.

For more information:
www.tink.com