GoCardless has announced its plans to acquire Nordigen, a freemium open banking data provider. This move will open GoCardless to a wider covering in its account-to-account network, more than 2,300 banks in 31 countries.
Nordigen’s technology will provide GoCardless with in-house open banking connectivity, providing free open banking connectivity at scale, opening up self-serve access to account information services (AIS). Additionally, it will offer a suite of premium data products which may help improve outcomes across a range of use cases from credit assessments to customer engagement.
This announcement is in line with the company’s open banking strategy, over the last 18 months it has launched its open-banking enabled Instant Bank Pay feature across multiple markets, and also launched Verified Mandates, which combines AIS with direct debit to prevent fraud.
Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless, said: “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. We believe this open access will lead to experimentation, and that will create even more compelling use cases.”
The deal is expected to close later in the summer. Further terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.