Open Banking went live on Saturday 13th January, the start of a revolution for the financial sector has begun. OpenWrks, a Nottingham based Fintech business are already making their mark on the industry, being named as the first company or third party provider (TPP) in the world to be FCA approved and listed in the Open Banking directory.
“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,” Olly Betts, OpenWrks CEO, commented. “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.”
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 team at OpenWrks are already award winning Open Banking practitioners; winners of the Nesta Open Up Challenge by including Open Banking data into Handle, the small business dashboard.
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 13th January and 28th February.
Over the coming weeks OpenWrks will be working with all of the 9 largest UK banks ensuring every banks API is stable and functioning correctly.
“To make sure OpenWrks unlocks the value of Open Banking for the market, we are working closely with a group of launch clients representing the hottest Fintechs from across the market from unsecured to secured lending, acquisition to debt management and consumer to small business,” Betts said of OpenWrks’ vision for the future.
“We will be mirroring the managed roll out 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 experiencers for their customers.”
