It was exactly a year ago when we first announced the receipt of the long-awaited authorisation by Finansinspektionen enabling us to provide our Account information and Payment initiation services. But what has changed since?
First you get the money. Then you get the license. Then you get the clients. That’s how Tony Montana would have summed up – rightly so – the main milestones outlined in our business plan. Such a simple sequence of events well describes three of our biggest achievements to date. And what a ride it has been to get them under our belt.
“Obtaining a PI license is definitely not for everyone. It did require a great amount of legal expertise, significant preparation, and a considerable investment in terms of time and costs, but it was vital for us to implement it”. This was how Adnan, our CEO, commented the receipt of the FSA license exactly one year ago. But what has happened since that fantastic day in January 2021?
We will focus here on the three main areas that really saw great improvements in the last 365 days.
We now have an array of live products.
The Finansinspektionen’s license (an actual FSA license, not a simple registration, mind you) really has marked a before and after for Finshark for so many reasons. Among other things, it allows us to operate in a very unique way, being literally positioned between our customers (i.e. a company) and their customers (i.e. the final end-users) to provide benefits to all the parties involved (if you do want to know more about this, feel free to ask Adnan – yes, we are that approachable!).
Since we have moved into production, we have managed to go live with a series of products all powered by real-time account data. Everything is now built on top of a very powerful, second to none, open banking platform developed from the ground up and designed to let any business link their services to it with a single line of code.
We currently offer open banking payment solutions (single direct payments, recurring, and payouts) and financial intelligence propositions capable to instantly verify things like incomes, account ownerships, spending behaviours, financial obligations, credit histories and much more. All our products perform equally well with personal and business accounts.
So far we have processed tens of millions of live transactions.
We only started selling six months ago and we are very proud of the interest we have gotten so far. We have onboarded customers who implemented and used every single product we are currently offering. Our clients and partners come from a very wide range of industries – from cryptocurrency exchanges to ecommerce platforms, from retail chains to financial institutions – and are all different in size – from thousands of employees to literally less than five. This variety really matches our mission of a more inclusive open banking, allowing all kinds of businesses to benefit from the transformational shift in payments and financial data.
Last but not least, we have a customer waiting list and a series of trials currently running as we write!
We will be hiring (like never before).
As our customer base grow, so do we. Developing has been our main thing for quite some time, but we have already expanded our efforts into integrating and fully supporting existing customers. Some serious growth is now in order in other departments as well, and we are absolutely thrilled to be entering this new, unexplored territory.
This year we are planning to double in size, so more colleagues will be welcomed into this friendly shiver of fintech sharks.
Don’t lose sight of our LinkedIn profile as you will see it happen right before your eyes!
More about Finshark.
Finshark is a Swedish founded second generation open banking company developing payment and financial data products on top of its proprietary infrastructure. We exist to enable payment-led product innovation by abstracting the complexity of the global open finance ecosystem.
We allow all businesses to benefit from the transformational shift in payments and financial data analytics. Want to know if your company can take advantage of it as well? Let’s chat.
