Next chapter: investing $7.5m in our customers

This brings our total funding to $12M since we started building TrueLayer in late 2016. Jeppe Zink from Northzone is joining our Board, and we can’t wait to benefit from his experience! We also want to say thanks to Pietro Bezza and Yann Ranchere, from Connect and Anthemis, for their enduring commitment and trust in our vision.

This is a big milestone for our team, and I wanted to take a moment to share my thoughts on TrueLayer and our plans for the future.

2018 is going to be a transformative year for our company. We went from being a “long shot” idea to becoming an enabler, and an important catalyst in the transformation of this ecosystem in the PSD2/OpenBanking era.

When we started in 2016, we saw a clear need for infrastructure for an industry that was taking shape and we saw ourselves delivering in three main directions:

• Building the connectivity rails of today and the infrastructure of tomorrow;

• Discovering use cases and bringing Bank APIs to the mainstream;

• Creating a safe and secure environment for our customers and end-users.

Two years later, we still believe these three remain our most fundamental directions. We are ready to double down for the betterment of our customers and for the whole industry.

Global connectivity

PSD2 is now a reality in Europe, and open banking is shaping up in many different countries — from the UK to Australia.

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As this industry progresses we continue to see fragmentation as the number one problem that TrueLayer will need to address in order to enable swift, easy and instant portability across geographies.

Francesco Simoneschi, CEO & Co-founder

This is the most fundamental requirement if we want to enable startups to grow faster, as well as international companies to serve their extended customer base.

TrueLayer has been involved since day one in creating standards such as Open Banking UK and providing feedback to regulatory bodies and industry initiatives such as the FCA and the Berlin Group. For as much as we like standardisation, we acknowledge that fragmentation will continue to be an issue for this industry and that the speed of innovation should go faster than pure compliance work. We continue to see a world where applications will use an array of different underlying technologies depending on their needs and use cases and we want TrueLayer to become the one-stop solution, abstracting this complexity away from the developers.

For this reason, we are extending our coverage to the rest of Europe and beyond. Our commitment is to connect all PSD2 countries in the coming months and enable applications to easily scale across geographies.

Use case driven APIs

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While developers can build a broad range of applications on our platform, certain use cases are more common. Our Use Case APIs build upon the above products to offer more fully implemented functionality for a specific purpose, […], thereby saving developers significant time in building their applications.

We love APIs. We love the concept of being able to take away complexity and build new layers of value. As connectivity gets abstracted away and solved, applications will start focusing on operating their services efficiently and harnessing the wealth of opportunities that Bank APIs are opening up.

At TrueLayer we think in terms of use cases, things we enable and things we don’t enable yet — practical and actionable units of value.

The goal is not technology for its own sake, but how we can enable new services to be built and consumers to be better served.

Our product team is currently building more use-case APIs in order to allow Lenders, Marketplaces, PFMs, Crypto Exchanges and Financial Apps to leverage more from our infrastructure; take advantage of our collective learning and extract value faster and with less effort (aka 100% more data enhancements, classification, payments, income/rent verification APIs).

Security and trust

We see ourselves as a B2C/Infrastructure player at the service of developers and innovative companies. As we see more applications going live using our API Platform, we realise that security and trust is the 'make-it-or-break-it' for open banking to become a ubiquitous and pervasive technology.

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In our early days, we stressed the security features of TrueLayer with all the developers we came across as we profoundly believed — and we still do — that security is the most important feature that we will never compromise on.

Many of our customers have come to appreciate the way we designed our security model and how this has helped them become compliant and trustworthy. It is now time to get the end-user to appreciate that and be able to easily recognise the applications that are handling privacy, security and compliance as first-class citizens.

We want open banking to eventually become a mainstream rail used by millions of people around the world and to help our customers thrive in this brave new world. We think TrueLayer can make a key contribution to making this happen. Stay tuned for more exciting product announcements later this year.

Wrapping it all up

We see this new funding as an opportunity not just for TrueLayer, but for all the developers we are engaged with and the ones with who we will be engaging with in the coming months.

This is our commitment to build modern, secure and future proof access to the bank infrastructure; and enable innovation and help millions of consumers to better share access to their accounts.

TrueLayer customers, you are great! Through our many flaws, you’ve kept the faith, and you’ve made us an important piece of your technology stack. We are fully committed to helping you build beautiful experiences, and making you thrive and be successful. Thank you for sticking with us!

As our team continues to grow, we keep the very same passion of the first day, as well as having more firepower than we ever had. We can’t wait to get all these new things into your hands.

PS: Thanks team — you are the doers that make things happen!

PPS: We are hiring!