Pilot programme at full speed

Take more than 900 Open Banking interested developers, individual programmers, Fintechs, banks, regional and global top-notch software-development companies. Then try to find those 20+ that should become the ones to pilot at Nordea’s Open Banking Developer Portal.

I was part of that selection process, which felt like trying to find needles in a haystack. We were looking for that perfect combination of a good idea and a will and potential for collaboration and co-creation that we find to be the winning factor in the new Open Banking space. Realising that we found some really interesting ones was so exciting. The third party developers selected during spring and summer were happy and eager to get started with our brand new Developer Portal, offering them early-bird access to the first and newest API-products available in the Nordic market.

On-boarding

During the last months, we have been busy inviting everyone who signed up for the programme, on-boarding them, learning from their experiences and finding out how they perceive our Developer Portal. We are interested in their feedback about the support we offer, our ways of handling questions and suggestions and in the challenges and successes they meet on their way with building the applications.

We met with several developers and companies to talk about how to team up in partnership arrangements and we also discussed how to work together and how to develop new and exciting solutions to the benefit of our customers.

This was a truly cool and inspiring experience for me with both a banking and IT background and very valuable input for our project.

What did I learn from the pilots?

In my interviews with a long range of companies across the Nordics I learnt that the documentation, support and comprehensive test material are considered to be the most important areas, as well as expanding the list of APIs available in our portal. During the summer and autumn period we have listened to the developers, tweaked and developed our sandbox-environment. I learnt that we were — and still are — on the right track.

Copenhagen Fintech Hackathon

In connection with the first ever Copenhagen Fintech Hackathon just a few weeks ago, we launched our new Sandbox v.2.0 which now supports both Account Information Service (AIS) and Payment Initiation Service (PIS) APIs. We simplified the data model to be more developer friendly, improved the consent-management and authentication flows and added more semi-dynamic test data.

The Hackathon was arranged by Rainmaking, a really cool incubator organisation in close connection with the Copenhagen Fintech Lab. Nordea was sponsoring the event and we had a dozen of our people on site throughout the whole event, supporting, coaching and mentoring the participants in their attempts to go from an idea to a working software in just 48 hours. The winner was a team with the cool name of ‘Loan Ranger’ who worked on a good idea of making the process of buying a house easier than today. Everyone worked hard during the weekend with impressive engagement and passion at Rainmaking’s premises in Christianshavn.

It was a great weekend event fueled by a pure spirit of co-creation and discovering new grounds together!

Getting access to real data is next — and the real fun begins!

After an exciting first phase where we have exposed test data and offered third parties to utilize our sandbox environment, we will soon offer true real-time production data to selected developers — of course based on the customer’s consent.

We will for sure also continue to improve our sandbox by listening to the community. We have already made a lot of material and functionality available — so look out for the future deliveries. I sure love to be part of it.

Should Nordea continue on the proactive track?

Of course!

We can learn a lot from teaming up and collaborating with many of the software developers we interact with — from the individual garage developers with great ideas to the established BigTech-companies on different markets.

My end quote from our responsible business partner Sanela Dulic summarises the project’s goal quite precisely:

“We see this as an opportunity to embrace the changing landscape. Our goal is to strengthen our collaboration with Fintechs and go beyond regulation by providing premium APIs which fit the changing needs of customers across all segments.”

About the author

Jakob Holst is a Strategic Business Developer in Nordea Open Banking with a long experience in working with Fintechs, ERP and Treasury Management system vendors and corporate customers.

He is a fast moving Dane, working in the Nordics, interested in technological developments, new forms of co-creation and development and to discover how to team up in partnerships and new business models.

Collaboration in the payment ecosystem is close to his heart and his passion.