Yapily provides an open banking solution for fintechs and enterprises that want to connect to banking institutions.

Raised via HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and LocalGlobe, the funding will help the company to further expand its tech team, build a sales team. Yapily founder Stefano Vaccino compared the opportunities that stem from the introduction of open banking to the telecom industry when companies such as Skype allowed Voice over IP to displace telecommunication providers.

He said: “I was inspired to build Yapily when I realised how revolutionary open banking would be and its social impact. Yapily offers a frictionless journey that lowers the open banking technical barrier without interfering with a company’s relationship with their consumer.” Yapily offers service providers the option to retrieve financial data and initiate payments by providing one single API to connect to all retail banks’.

The company boasts clients across a range of industries including: accountancy firms, payment companies, crypto currency providers, digital wealth applications and e-commerce companies.

Vaccino continued: “I believe that we can democratise finance by making it possible for consumers to share their information in seconds through APIs. This can speed up loan approvals for small businesses, or even reduce the cost of all e-commerce transactions by 1 – 2%, a saving which can be passed on to the consumer.

“There is also a great opportunity here to help people overcome financial exclusion by giving consumers full visibility of their incomings and outgoings, and even warning them if they are embarking on financially risk behaviour.”

In the announcement, Yapily said it is already connected to 35 banks across Europe – equating to 250m bank accounts. By year end, the firm expects to be connected to 536 banks.

Remus Brett, investor at LocalGlobe and Barbod Namini, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, explained: “We are on the brink of open banking and this is creating a huge opportunity to innovate finance, around the world. “We are incredibly excited about the scale of what Yapily offers and think that its focus on API technology can deliver a game-changing solution for enterprises and ultimately for the end consumer.”

Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, COO at GoCardless, commented: “We’ve worked closely with Yapily and are really impressed by the developer tools that they provide us with.

“Our goal is to fix a broken payment landscape offering a frictionless service for our end customers and with Yapily we have been able to get closer to that quickly.