The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has granted Yolt Technology Services a PSD2 license allowing them to provide open banking services independently.
PSD2 is a European regulation for electronic payment services that aims to increase payments security in Europe and encourage innovation to help banking services adapt to new technologies.
With its new license, YTS can continue with payment services activities that include Payment Initiation Services (PIS) and Account Information Services (AIS) under its own independent FCA license as opposed to that of shareholder ING.
The FCA license will help YTS further its ambition to spread the benefits of open banking and it will now be able to extend its regulated services to businesses without a PSD2 licence.
Since making its first application programming interface (API) call in 2018, YTS has been providing PIS and AIS services to financial institutions and tech businesses across the UK and Europe, operating under ING’s banking licence.
Now, after a period of rapid growth, YTS says it has taken on full responsibility for its operations and obtained its own FCA licence to fully realise the open banking potential in the UK market.
Leon Muis, chief business officer at Yolt Technology Services, comments: “This is a significant milestone and shows just how far we’ve come since launching Yolt Technology Services into the UK market in September 2019.”
“From making the first ever open banking API call for our client, the Yolt app, to surpassing one billion API calls in 2020, to now obtaining our own FCA licence, which will help us realise our ambition to bring the vast benefits of open banking to even more businesses.”
Muis adds: “Open banking has enormous potential to revolutionise the way both businesses and customers process and access financial information, ultimately delivering increased efficiency and richer insights for businesses, which is especially pertinent in a post-COVID and post-Brexit world. Our ambition is to drive this revolution across Europe.”
