Nordigen introduces free European open banking API

Latvian fintech startup Nordigen is switching to a freemium model thanks to a free open banking API. Open banking was supposed to democratize access to banking information, but the company believes banking aggregation APIs from Tink or Plaid are too expensive. Instead, Nordigen thinks it can provide a free API to access account information and paid services for analytics and insights services.

Open banking is a broad term and means different things, from account aggregation to verifying account ownership and payment initiation. The most basic layer of open banking is the ability to view data from third-party financial institutions. For instance, some banks let you connect to other bank accounts so that you can view all your bank accounts from a single interface.

There are two ways to connect to a bank. Some banks provide an application programming interface (API), which means that you can send requests to the bank's servers and receive data in return.

While all financial institutions should have an open API due to the European PSD2 directive, many banks are still dragging their feet. That's why open banking API companies usually rely on screen scraping. They mimic web browser interactions, which means that it's slow, it requires a ton of server resources and it can break.

If you're wondering how we'd be able to afford it, our free banking data API was designed purely with PSD2 in mind, meaning it's lightweight in strong contrast to that of incumbents. So it wouldn't significantly increase our costs to scale free users," Nordigen co-founder and CEO Rolands Mesters told me.

So you don't get total coverage with Nordigen's API. The startup currently supports 300 European banks, which covers 60 to 90% of the population in each country. But it's hard to complain when it's a free product anyway.

Some Nordigen customers will probably want more information. Nordigen provides financial data analytics. It can be particularly useful if you're a lending company trying to calculate a credit score, if you're a financial company with minimum income requirements and more.

For those additional services, you'll have to pay. Nordigen currently has 50 clients and expects to attract more customers with its new freemium strategy.