Open Banking went live on Saturday January 13, signalling the start of a revolution for the financial sector. Nottingham-based fintech OpenWrks was named the first company or third party provider (TPP) in the world to be approved by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and listed in the Open Banking directory.
Olly Betts, OpenWrks CEO, commented: “Being named the first TPP fully registered to the Open Banking directory clearly demonstrates the pace that we operate at and our drive to make Open Banking a success for everybody in the UK.
“We recently launched the OpenWrks website, our Developer Portal and our Sandbox API providing the opportunity for developers and product owners to explore our API and understand how they can use OpenWrks to seamlessly access real-time financial data through a single, simple and secure API,” said Betts.
OpenWrks vision is to accelerate the adoption of Open Banking so every person in the UK can benefit from the wealth of new features Open Banking enabled apps will bring to the market and the improved convenience and personalisation of existing services it will enable.
The OpenWrks platform allows product providers to create the groundbreaking apps and services customers demand by allowing them to connect to every bank through one secure API.
“Our team have spent the New Year period working with the banks who’ve produced mature APIs to conduct extensive end-to-end testing of their Open Banking APIs and I’m extremely pleased to say that we’ve already proven full end-to-end authentication, connectivity and are processing real-time data from those banks.”
For the banks that missed that deadline, OpenWrks has been chosen as one of a select group of companies to support those banks during the ‘managed roll out’ of Open Banking between January 13 and February 28.
Over the coming weeks, OpenWrks will be working with nine of the largest UK banks ensuring every banks API is stable and functioning correctly.
Commenting on OpenWrks forward view, Betts said: “To make sure OpenWrks unlocks the value of Open Banking for the market, we are working closely with a group of launch clients from across the market from unsecured to secured lending, acquisition to debt management and consumer to small business.
“We will be mirroring the managed rollout approach, incrementally releasing banks to our API as they become available and we deem the banks APIs to be reliable.
“The fact we are going through this process eliminates the needless complexity and removes the bloat for our clients of working with multiple banks and account providers. OpenWrks can provide all of this capability through a single, secure API which allows our clients to focus on creating quicker, slicker and better experiences for their customers.”