What is XS2A: Bonify as a real life example

This week was pretty busy and there was a lot of material for different kinds of blog posts. The biggest news was probably the overdue RTS which was finally released by EBA. However, I am not going to write about these important technical details of PSD2. I want to write about the bigger picture and some real time examples of PSD2.

As mentioned in a previous blog post, PSD2 is just a regulatory requirement which is putting customer demands into a law. PSD2 is increasing the speed in the market while pushing banks into a direction where they have to go anyway, but this development would have happened even without PSD2.

The bigger picture of PSD2 is Open Banking and the usage of our financial data in third party services. At figo we have some amazing partners showing all of us what will be the new “normal” in our financial future.

This week our figo partner Bonify has announced a strong 5.5m EUR Series A funding led by Mosaic Ventures and Ribbit Capital. Users of the Bonify service can access their credit scoring free of charge (scoring provided by Creditreform) and also manage their finances (access to bank accounts provided by figo). Bonify is using this data to provide their users with tailored offers in areas such as telecommunication, internet, electricity, gas, and so forth. These offers tend to be less cost intensive and/or provide more convenient payment options compared to traditional offers. How is that possible? The key to this is: data. Bonify knows a lot more about your financial situation and can use this to provide you with tailored deals.

That is the bigger picture of PSD2 and the current Open Banking movement: give consumers control over their (financial) data and enable them to use their data in services they would like to use.

Bonify is especially an interesting example because it combines two topics – scoring and financial data – that are so strongly connected but as a consumer we have to use different services to handle them (if we even can).

This does not only apply for scoring but also for many other cases. Financial data affects our life in so many situations – it’s time that we treat them appropriately and connect them to services that provide us with solutions we want to use. Like Bonify.

We are very happy to be part of the Bonify story and are looking forward to a better future of credit scoring!