License for Finqware to launch its corporate embedded finance platform in Europe

Finqware, a European fintech startup based in Bucharest, received from the National Bank of Romania the payment institution license to act as regulated account information and payment initiation service provider.

Using the passport procedure, the company can be able to operate in all 27 EU countries, connecting to any of the 6000+ banks in the European Union area for getting banking data or posting account to account payment orders for its enterprise customers.

“Until now, only very large global companies could install, on their premises, very costly and sophisticated solutions for treasury management, payments, and financial operations about their banking partners. However, in the range of mid-market companies, such solutions are currently having very low adoption, due to their complexity and high capital expenses. The bank APIs are here now to open the access to extremely proficient treasury and cash management solutions to a wide number of companies, for a fraction of the price, on a monthly subscription-based model. Open banking connectivity comes also with unparallel benefits against the old technologies, like real-time data pulling and no-human touch financial data processing potential. And Finqware has the aggregation technology to leverage these opportunities for businesses”, said Cosmin Cosma, Co-founder, and CEO of Finqware.

The license, based on the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) which regulates the payments ecosystem in the EU, is an important milestone in the company’s strategy to launch, across all of Europe, its FinqTreasury solution. FinqTreasury is aimed to become the most important fully-fledged embedded banking platform for mid-market companies, automating their internal financial operations, based on open banking.

Finqware started in 2018 as a technical service provider for banks such as OTP Bank, Banca Transilvania, and CEC Bank and has been continuously developing and improving its deep tech infrastructure for bank APIs aggregation. The purpose was to end up with one of the most solid and scalable financial data hubs, capable of delivering the security, data quality, and real-time requirements of the corporate finance users.

The company’s vision is to turn open banking and APIs into the preferred bank connectivity solution for large companies, relying on its infrastructure for APIs aggregation.

FinqTreasury, the first open banking solution for treasury, accounting, and collections automation is soon to be launched commercially, after one year of being battle-tested in trial projects with 15 companies. It is already equipped with a cash management dashboard accessible as a SaaS application and an API for automating the bank statements’ import into any ERP.

By the end of the year, the solution will also provide a flow of corporate payments initiation and sign-off. The roadmap for the next two years also includes features for streamlining invoice payments, check-out payments, reporting & forecasting as well as financial audit support. The aim is to provide a 360-degree coverage of all financial operations involving banking into a single embedded banking solution for ERPs.

In the next period, Finqware will concentrate on the commercial launch of the product in different countries. The company starts a fundraising campaign looking for the capital needed to fastrack in monetising its market potential.

Photo: Finqware founders, from left to right - Danut Covalciuc (COO), Cosmin Cosma (CEO), Dumitru Taraianu (CTO)