To mirror our European expansion, we’re changing our company name from Nordic API Gateway to Aiia. It’s a new name with a fresh feel that reflects our journey to new markets as we continue to grow our platform.

Read on and see everything about our new name, our market expansion plans and how we plan to continue to deliver open banking that simply works with the same principles we’ve used to build a successful open banking platform in the Nordics.

New name, same mission.

One of the reasons why we started our open banking journey more than 10 years ago - before open banking even existed - was to empower people to bring their financial data into play in a safe and transparent way. And it still is today.

As we’ve built a successful open banking platform in the Nordics that now processes billions of transactions and millions of payments every month, we’re ready to turn complexity into simplicity for new markets all across Europe.

Of course, we’re doing that in the same way that allows room to build the same quality that we’ve done in our home markets. Our CEO, Rune Mai, explains:

“Because we’ve built our organisation the way we have - and because we’ve had time to stay in the Nordics as long as necessary, we’ve built a model that works. If you ask me, that’s the real reason why we have such a high bar for quality,” he says and continues:

“The same goes for our European expansion. We’ve had time and peace of mind to find out what it takes to create quality, and now, we’re ready to take that quality model to new markets.”

Open banking that simply works

But to build truly innovative and personalised services with open banking in any market, you need an open banking platform that works in every aspect - and that’s easier said than done in a space that’s still struggling to comply with the regulatory requirements.

To make sure open banking succeeds, we decided to work with the industry from the very beginning. And we’ll continue to do so in our journey across Europe. But what does it actually mean to do that and why did we decide to take that approach to open banking?

Put simply, we’ve always focused on three guiding principles to create an open banking platform that’s second-to-none:

Privacy by design
Quality over quantity
Secure and compliant

Let’s see what the pillars mean.

1. Privacy by design. Impossible to screw up.

Privacy by design is a principle that makes sure financial data is never shared or used in unintentional ways, as Aiia’s Co-founder, Gudmundur Hreidarsson, explains:

“We’ve always accepted that we’re humans - and humans make mistakes. With that, there’s no way not to respect privacy in the way we’ve built our business. Other platforms might have a way of saying: ‘Turn security on. Turn security off’. But because we’re humans, that model leaves room for mistakes,” he says and continues:

“With Aiia, there’s simply no way of not respecting privacy because it’s a fundamental element in the platform we’ve built.”

2. Quality over quantity. Craftsmen of open banking.

If privacy by design tells the story of how much Aiia cares about respecting the privacy of financial data, quality over quantity tells the story of who Aiia is as an open banking platform. It means that we have a product that actually works - and that’s the essence of Aiia. Commenting on that, Rune Mai, explains:

“Quality over quantity is the principle that ensures open banking works without any obstacles. It means we don’t blitzscale and say we’re live with open banking in more than 20 countries if we only have a few connections in those markets. Instead, we make sure we cover a market fully with high-quality connections; that’s why we call ourselves craftsmen in open banking,” he explains.

3. Secure and compliant. Every bank’s dreams.

That leads us to our third and final building principle, which is all about being secure and compliant. It’s a principle that’s strongly linked to our privacy by design model, but it’s also a testament to the effort we’ve put into analysing and interpreting regulation in different markets. To elaborate more on that, Gudmundur Hreidarsson explains:

“If you’ve built a system in which it’s totally impossible to screw things up, it’s really easy to be secure and compliant. But being compliant is also about being compliant with regulation, knowing the rules in each market and making sure that we’re playing by those rules. That also makes it easy for banks and financial institutions to work with our setup, because they don’t have to worry about compliance,” he says.

Taking Aiia to the rest of Europe

So, what countries are we expanding our platform to in Europe? And how do we continue to work with the industry in the new markets?

We’ve started our expansion in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the Netherlands, where we’ve worked with businesses and financial institutions to build open banking services with account aggregation and payment initiation.

With that, we’re set to offer bulk payments, recurring payments and cross-border payments to push heavily into the vast addressable European payments markets.