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One of the shortcomings of the PSD2 legislation is that, unlike UK's open banking regulation, it did not mandate open API Banking standards. As a result, each bank in Europe is building their own APIs, which in turn limits the ability of fintech (and banks using other banks APIs) to scale to a large enough market. This is great that Spiir, who had to solve this problem for their own savings and PFM app by integrating each bank individually, have been able to now market their integration layer as its own product. Good to see they have plans to expand across Europe. I'm curious as to what their roadmap is and for which countries. The French and German markets already use stet and the Berlin Group standards, so Nordic API Gateway could prioritise other regions first perhaps?  

Almost a year after worldwide discussions on the problematic approach of gendering AI services (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/this-is-why-ai-has-a-gender-problem/), Westpac comes out with this

Hmm... its admirable to see SocGen starting to think about this, but there is a lot more banks could do. The FSG model in the US has some great ideas about how corporations can think about their COVID-19 response. In particular, they can analyse who is most effected in their customer base, workforce and suppliers and look at what they can do. For example, can they pay smaller suppliers faster than NET 60 (or whatever they have in place) to help with cashflows? Can they work with government to ensure faster processing of stimulus payments? Also, the forecast of coming changes points to one big thing i think: APIs will be needed by banks in greater numbers. Both internal APIs to speed up product development and extyernal facing ones to create more innovative products for customers who need access to a greater range of financial services via mobile now. 

It's not surprising that Lithuania is leading in Europe. While PSD2 has aimed to open the doors to banking services and make it possible for new fintech players to enter the market, in reality there are no mandated European API standards so fintech end up having to build integrations for individual banks or groups of banks. (There are some standards emerging but no requirement for any one bank to use them so fintechs can't essily scale in this environment.) The Bank of Lithuania has avoided this fragmentation. They specifically sought to extend PSD2 when regulating it in their country, using it as an opportunity to set goals to become a fintech hub for Europe. They set up a Payments Council working group to bring together banks, fintech and consumers to encourage collaboration and take advantage of the open banking opportunities. Already that is paying off and has helped their fintech contribute to COVID-19 responses. Great to see. 

Congrats to Shamir and his team on raising this investment. Shamir's work on segmenting developer audiences (https://www.cgap.org/blog/youve-opened-apisnow-what) when creating an open API go to market strategy is useful reading for any fintech looking to build an ecosystem around their product.