These days, it’s hard to imagine a finance company that’s not collaborating with outside sources to help boost the ease, speed and simplicity of their online services.
One of the companies that sees the value in that collaboration is Smartney, a top growing fintech in Poland, with a market share of 16%. In 2021, it became a leader in the sale of consumer loans for a period of over 12 months. However, with a team of only 70 people, there is a limit to the solutions Smartney can develop internally. That’s why they look for innovative ideas from outside sources like Kontomatik to help improve their speed, operability, and simplicity in the services they offer.
Open banking as a "solution of the future"
Regulations passed by the European Parliament over the last several years have heralded in faster and faster development of financial technology. One of the most important of those regulations came In 2018, when the EU passed the PSD2 directive, which allowed certain third parties access to the financial history of banking customers, with the consent of those customers, thus introducing open banking to the European market.
Previously, that type of financial data was only used by a bank or institution providing financial services like selling loans to customers. But with the advent of open banking, certain third parties gained access to data like a customer’s account history, their bank transactions, their spending habits and certain identifying information. With that information, third parties were able to make more informed decisions about offering services like loans and mortgages to customers, as well as tweak or personalize their services based on the customer’s financial data.
Simply put, the new regulations opened the market so third parties could finally be in competition with banking institutions.
With that new competition, third parties got to work creating innovative new technology and improving their user experience as they vied with other companies on the competitive market. One of these third parties that has emerged as a leader in the open banking market – thanks largely to the ease and simplicity of their user experience – is non-bank lending company Smartney.
How does open banking work at Smartney?
Smartney works with Kontomatik to verify its clients applying for a loan.
Customer identification, which is based on open banking methods and uses data provided by Kontomatik, takes an average of 11 seconds, much faster than many alternatives.
That’s part of the reason that 67% of the company’s customers choose this method of identification out of all available verification methods.
Credit verification takes another minute for the company to process data from several sources. Once again, a minute to process data is far away from the time it takes to visit a stationary branch, submit a certificate of income and fill out a long loan application that asks detailed questions about a borrower's financial situation.
While Smartney is a fintech, itself, it successfully implements solutions provided by other companies. Those solutions concern things like advertising, identification, verification, and payment of funds. At every stage of the process, Smartney uses modern solutions provided by external partners. When other market participants act similarly, that collaboration allows the built ecosystem to grow stronger each year.
