Fintech startup Yapily has raised a $51 million Series B funding round led by Sapphire Ventures. The company has been working on a single, unified open banking API for several European markets. Developers can leverage that programming interface to interact with third-party bank accounts directly from their own products.
“The core difference between us and most of the players in the space is our focus on the infrastructure,” founder and CEO Stefano Vaccino told me. Unlike Tink or TrueLayer, Yapily operates in the background. You never see a Yapily logo anywhere and the company provides no front-end interface.
Another difference is that Yapily focuses exclusively on API integrations. Due to recent regulatory changes in Europe (PSD2), banks now have to offer official APIs to integrate with third-party services. While some still don’t offer APIs, many of them are now complying with the rules.
By focusing on official APIs, Yapily can offer a snappier and more reliable experience. Other startups working on unified open banking APIs rely on a mix of official APIs, screen scraping and private APIs. Screen scraping can be particularly slow and private APIs sometimes stop working overnight.
When it comes to coverage, Yapily supports more than 1,500 banks across eight different countries. “We have between 90 and 99% coverage in the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands,” Vaccino said. You can see the full list of banks on this page. According to Vaccino, only Tink has a similar level of coverage in Europe.
