We’ve seen a 20% week-on-week increase in signups to our Data API, with the majority of developers asking for access to data from the challenger banks. We are happy to announce that we released our Starling Bank integration last month.

Like our previous announcements regarding partnerships with Monzo, Zopa and Clockwise, it generated a fair bit of interest in the media. Which was not surprising given the lack of general information about open banking and PSD2, balanced with the need for developers to have more optionality.

Developers and brand new startups are even more eager to get into the loop of new tools and services in order to deliver future-proof products. In fact, for consumers, the big question is how will these partnerships result in new services and products?

How we integrated Starling

Contrary to the high street banks’ open banking flow, which requires login information such as a user’s ID and password, some of the challenger banks created a smooth flow that permits the user to connect their bank with just a single action. Starling’s flow, for instance, asks the user to scan a QR code (that expires in a few minutes) directly from the Starling App Interface.

Data API Access

Once the end-user authorises access to their financial information and transactions, the TrueLayer API displays information regarding the accounts, balance and historical transactions in the unified interface familiar to our users. Access to the information can be revoked by the end-user at any point through our API and it can be re-enabled by re-authorising the TrueLayer application.

At TrueLayer we care a great deal about making a developer’s life easier. That’s why we offer ‘under the same hood’ integrations for most banks in the UK, challenger banks and soon open banking providers. In the next few weeks and months, you’ll keep hearing about many more partnerships and integrations, that will help you and your company seamlessly and immediately access the bank data for 98% of the population in the UK with one, unified API.

Then, as open banking and PSD2 gather pace, we’ll start to see a raft of new fintech services capitalising on this network, including payments which we expect to launch in Q2, 2018.