Yapily raises $51 million in new Series B Funding round
Yapily, the UK Open Banking company, has announced that it has raised $51 million in its Series B funding round that was led by Sapphire Ventures and had other investors including Lakestar, HV Capital, and others.
The company has been working on building a single unified banking API that can be used by businesses to connect to third-party bank accounts across the UK and this would help to provide a single API to communicate with a wide variety of banks and accounts in them.
“The core difference between us and most of the players in the space is our focus on the infrastructure,” said founder and CEO Stefano Vaccino.
The company seems to like to be working in the background as it relies solely on the development and usage of APIs. It doesn’t have any user interface anywhere and has been using the official APIs of various banks across Europe. It is likely that all banks in Europe would eventually have to come up with APIs to access their banking services and this could then be used to build a single unifying API all across Europe to bring them all under a single platform that businesses can use.
The company currently supports 1500 banks across 8 countries and this is expected to increase as the company is expected to utilise the funds to grow and expand across Europe. Digital payments are expected to rule the payments industry in the coming years and APIs would be a key part of that. With more and more users preferring to check their balances and make transactions online, within banks, and outside, all these need to be handled by the APIs.
So the use of a unified API would make it very convenient for businesses and users as well to build platforms on them. While some countries have managed to bring all their banks under a single umbrella API, the Eurozone as a block needs to achieve the same. This is going to be a herculean task with the number of countries and banks involved and with many banks still without their own APIs.
So, the business case for what Yapily is doing is certainly well valid which is reflected in the trust that the investors have placed in them and their API product. This is likely to be a big disruptor for the online banking space in the years to come as many platforms are likely to be built on top of this.
