Founded in 2013 , Salt Edge Inc., a leader in creating and providing open banking solutions, takes intercommunications and interoperability between banks, third-party service providers, and their end-users to a whole new level. The company achieves this goal by creating stable, secure connectivity channels between financial institutions and their consumers.
For consumers, Salt Edge’s solutions help create tools that give them a wider view of their finances. With Oval Money Ltd., for example, Salt Edge provided an API to track users’ expenses and earnings automatically from any account. Open banking is integral to this product. As Salt Edge explained, “This wide functionality is only possible if all the users’ transactions are consolidated automatically from various sources and they do not have to input data manually.”
For lenders, Salt Edge helps users access a new channel of real-time financial data that automatically verifies applicant’s identity, account number, income sources, and balance in real time. Lenders can evaluate a potential borrower’s financial behavior more accurately, which helps them keep risk under control.
Today, Salt Edge is connected to more than 5000 financial institutions across the world. By joining FDATA North America, Salt Edge plans to bring the same cohesive, secure, consumer-friendly system to individuals, families, and small businesses in Canada and the United States. “We’re all into proactive engagement, pursuing an appropriate legal framework, which will support the development of open-banking-based financial services. Open banking in North America is quite different from the European practice, so getting a mandated and regulated state of certainty will definitely catalyze things to move forward,” Salt Edge CEO Dmitrii Barbasura said.
In a February 2021 blog post, Barbasura outlined the six elements necessary to make open banking work in any country. These include:
- Control – any market participant that seeks to get access to the open banking ecosystem should be verified and licensed.
- Providing third parties with access to financial data or payment initiation capabilities should apply the most secure, but at the same time, convenient means of authorization and user authentication.
- Uniformity of conditions.
- Insuring every involved party against fraudulent acts, data breaches, operational disruption, and other risks.
- Ensuring monetization of APIs.
- Access to all consumer accounts, if a consumer allows it. Accounts will determine the next step in open banking evolution – open finance.
Barbasura concluded, “Combined with mobile platforms, open banking provides secure and fast access to financial services anywhere and in the most comfortable format for the user.”
Salt Edge joined FDATA North America in April 2021.