A San Francisco company is rolling out its services in the UK in the hopes of capitalising on its open banking regulations.
FinTech firm Plaid provides tech which allows financial technology companies to link to customers’ bank accounts.
In its home country America, the technology is already integrated with 15,000 banks and last year secured a valuation $2.65bn.
The company claims that a quarter of US consumers with bank accounts have connected to Plaid through an app.
It now hopes to replicate its success in the US, by opening a UK office to support a European expansion, hiring 25 staff locally by 2020.
For the UK launch, Plaid is initially supporting integrations with eight of the UK’s biggest banks and neobanks, giving British fintech businesses instant access to 70 per cent of personal current accounts in the country.
The firm, founded in 2013, said it has already launched with two UK customers, including money-management chat app Emma.
It already works with big FinTech apps in the US such as Venmo and Wealthfront, allowing them to ‘plug in’ directly to each other.
Open banking regulations, introduced by the UK government last year, are designed to improve competition between financial products by forcing banks to share data of their current account holders at their request.
“For fintech in the UK, there’s this incredible boom,” Plaid co-founder Zach Perret said in an interview. “It’s a market we’ve always wanted to be to be in.”