Robo investment platform adopts open banking-based payments

Denmark-based fintech Nord Investments has adopted open banking technology from Aiia to make it easier for people using its platform to make investments.

The robotic software investment platform, which currently only operates in Denmark, said it wanted to make it easier for its 7,000 active investors to make payments onto the platform when making investments.

Nord Investments is a robo-based investment platform aimed at consumers. It has about 75,000 users, some 7,000 of which have invested money. There has been about DKK 2bn (£240,000) invested in the platform so far. It was originally launched in 2017, and in 2019 relaunched in partnership with Saxo Bank, which stores customer assets and provides its platform to trade for customers of Nord Investments.

With most processes automated, convenience is at Aiia’s core, making it simple for anybody to invest.

To this end, open banking technology from the Mastercard-owned firm will enable users to make payments from their bank accounts within the investment platform, rather than having to go into their online bank and fill out details.

Anders Hartmann, CEO and co-founder of Nord Investments, said this was quite a problematic part of its users’ journeys. “When a customer wanted to invest money, they had to go into their own bank and set up a manual payment – which is an annoying process – and there were errors,” he said.

“When things are complicated and take time, people often don’t get them done,” added Hartmann. “But with the open banking solution, we can facilitate the payment within our own app with a few clicks. Now, we’re able to offer everything on our own platform, making it significantly easier for people to get started with their investment plans.”

Implementing the open banking functionality was a first for Nord Investments, which was supported by Mastercard’s tech team.

“This is one of the first solutions of its kind, and whenever you do something like this it can be complicated, but with the Mastercard tech team working with us, it only took a couple of months to integrate,” he said.

Jonas Vogt Rasmussen, vice-president of banking sales at Mastercard, said the functionality would “encourage more users to add funds to the investment platforms and allow Nord Investments to grow its business”.

Mastercard acquired Aiia – previously known as the Nordic API Gateway – for an undisclosed sum about a year ago.

Open banking services were made possible by the European Union’s Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), which came into effect in 2018.

PSD2 enables third parties to access the customer data held by banks via application programming interfaces – if customer consent is granted – and offer services using this information. For example, a company – with your consent – can take a payment directly from your account without you leaving its website.