Visa has announced its intention to buy Tink for €1.8 billion ($2.15 billion at today’s exchange rate). Tink is a renowned European fintech firm specializing in open banking application programming interfaces (API).
Visa, the world’s largest credit card company, has abandoned its plan to buy open banking startup OpenBanking. The move comes a few months after Visa abandoned its acquisition of Plaid, another popular open banking startup. Originally, Visa planned to spend $5.3 billion to acquire the startup.
Tink is a new service that allows you to link your bank accounts with your own apps and services. Tink provides a single API for accessing account statements, initiating payments, retrieving financial information, and refreshing this data on a regular basis.
While the EU’s Payment Services Directive PSD2 requires all banks and financial institutions to provide open banking interfaces, there is no one standard. Tink works with over 3,400 financial institutions and banks, and will be likely to expand.
The same API call may be used by app developers to communicate with bank accounts from different financial institutions. As you may expect, it makes the adoption of open source software much easier.