The company now raises a seed round investment of 1.2 MEUR from Brightly Ventures, Luminar Ventures, and selected angel investors. Vidici Ventures has previously invested in the company. The capital will be used to grow the team and launch the platform in the Nordic and European market.

The final date for implementation of the EU directive PSD2 is on September 14th, when the banks have to release their open APIs into production. The Swedish fintech startup Open Payments has prepared for this by, over the past two years, developing a technically advanced platform that enables the company to easily and efficiently integrate with the banks' APIs. The company has also focused on building a development portal where third-party providers and business partners can develop their own products and services under their own brand-name, using Open Payments white-label solution. This ecosystem of third-party providers and business partners will further enhance the development portal going forward.

Open Payments offers an open and secure access point to the various bank APIs in the Nordic markets, and starting in 2020 Open Payments will expand and integrate with other banks across the EU. A third-party provider can, using one API, gain access to all the EU banks' diversified APIs and then, through a simple white label solution, use the functions within PSD2.

“Several organisations within the EU claim that they are already operating within the framework of PSD2. The majority of these organisations are using what will soon become obsolete technology and APIs based on screen scraping and reversed engineering, while our platform is fully developed with the latest technology that PSD2 requires, i.e. open and standardized APIs. Therefore, our platform is a much more secure, cost-effective and flexible solution for our customers and their end-users. It gives us a huge advantage over existing solutions that suffer from a large technical heritage”, says Louise Brandt, Co-founder and CCO at Open Payments.

The founding team of Open Payments consists of, in addition to Louise Brandt, who was previously with iZettle where she held several senior positions, also CEO Jonas Kjellin, with a background from the American startup scene and many years at Microsoft, as well as Chief Product Officer Per Westin, who has long experience in product- and service development, most recently at Accenture Interactive.

With the new funding, Open Payments will grow the team and launch their platform in the Nordic and European markets. Right now, several collaborations are underway, where the positive response has been overwhelming.

“We met the team some time ago, and are struck by the insight, vision and execution power of the team. We are seeing powerful transformational forces beginning to reshape the global payment service landscape. Open Payments is democratizing payments, for the European retailers, businesses and banks, enabling many new innovations, with a positive effect to European businesses and consumers. One could say that Open Payments transforms and opens up payments, like Linux transformed operating systems”, says Katja Bergman at Brightly Ventures.