Yapily to acquire finAPI in open banking consolidation move

Fintech startup Yapily is announcing that it plans to acquire finAPI — the transaction is subject to regulatory approvals before it closes. Both companies offer open banking solutions in Europe.

With this move, Yapily is consolidating its position in Europe and growing its business in Germany more specifically. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but the company says it is a ‘multi-million’ transaction.

Based in the U.K., Yapily offers a single, unified open banking API to interact with bank accounts. Unlike Tink or TrueLayer, Yapily offers a low-level solution without any front-end interface. Developers have to code their own bank connection flow. The result is more control and no Yapily logo.

Due to European PSD2 regulation, banks have to offer programming interfaces (APIs) so that they can work better with third-party services. Yapily has focused specifically on official API integrations and covers thousands of banks. It doesn’t rely on screen scraping and private APIs.

Companies can leverage open banking to check the balance on a bank account, fetch the most recent transactions, but also initiate payments directly from a bank account.

finAPI is also an open banking provider. Originally from Munich, Germany, the company has been around since 2008 — Schufa acquired a majority stake in finAPI in 2019. It offers an API with coverage in Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. Like Yapily, finAPI clients can obtain account information and initiate payments using an API.

In addition to those pure open banking products, finAPI also offers the ability to verify the age and identity of a customer. This can be useful to comply with KYC (“Know Your Customer”) regulation.

Yapily currently covers 16 European markets and the company says it is the leader in the U.K. But the startup isn’t currently active in Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. With today’s acquisition, the company is expanding to these three new markets and becoming the leader in Germany.

As you can see, there’s some product feature overlap between Yapily and finAPI. And the acquisition makes sense as the two companies didn’t start in the same market.

Yapily works with companies like American Express, Intuit Quickbooks, Moneyfarm, Volt, Vivid and BUX. finAPI’s clients include ING, Datev, Swiss Life, ImmobilienScout24 and Finanzguru.

“This is a hugely exciting milestone for Yapily on our journey from disruptive startup to ambitious scale-up. Within three years from launch, we have commercialized our platform, grown our customer base, and now have the largest open banking payments volumes in Europe. Working with finAPI, we can gain more speed, agility, and depth to accelerate innovation and shape the future of open finance in Europe and beyond,” Yapily founder and CEO Stefano Vaccino said in a statement.

When it comes to payments in particular, Yapily and finAPI have processed a combined total of $39.5 billion in payment volumes over the last 12 months. Essentially, Yapily will double its customer base with this acquisition.