FINTECH FOCUS: PLATFORMS Meet Susan. She’s in her late 50s, and the typical 25-year mortgage term didn’t pan out for her. She was looking forward to easing off work, but due to house moves, supporting her kids through university and two weddings, she’s still at least 10 years from paying off her home loan. Then there’s Scott. He exports tractors for a living – a niche area but he makes it pay. Since Brexit, though, the paperwork his business generates has become a nightmare, and he has less than a week to get his income tax return submitted. Banks historically haven’t really been much help in either of these situations. Lenders haven’t encouraged their customers to pay up early, and small business accounting services weren’t really the banks’ bag, either. But now the game has changed for our hypothetical pair. Open banking has spawned fintech solutions for Susan, Scott and millions of other ordinary folk in similar spots. In the brave new world
of partnerships, the solutions can be multi-layered, too, with several fintechs collaborating to fully meet these customers’ needs. This is the era of the enablers and to illustrate how they can help our fictional characters Susan and Scott, we’re calling on the very real services of PPS, Sprive and Talenom. PPS, with offices in the UK, Brussels, Dubai and Berlin, is a back-end banking-as-a-service (Baas) powerhouse, offering payment processing, e-wallets, compliance and fraud detection services, programme design and management. PPS’ banking services can link Susan’s current account to her mortgage lender via the Sprive app, which sweeps surplus cash across each month to clear her loan faster, without her having to think about it. For Finnish accounting firm Talenom, PPS provides a bank account for SMEs like Scott’s, so he can automate his bookkeeping and concentrate on selling tractors. Ray Brash, PPS chief executive, says such partnerships are increasingly the way the world works, and open banking and the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) were the keys that unlocked a myriad of possibilities.
“At PPS, our core skills are around payment processing and regulation,” he says. “Talenom’s core skills are connecting with SMEs and providing professional services. This best of both worlds is what creates the value here, seamlessly. We sit behind our customers and provide a service so that the end user wouldn’t even know there was a third party involved. We take care of all the regulation, so companies like Talenom and Sprive can focus on providing the best user experience and best value proposition for vtheir customers.” Talenom has been in the business of providing accounting services for 50 years, but has recently targeted sole traders and SMEs, which were traditionally poorly served by Finland’s mainstream banks. Accounting Alex (or TiliJaska in Finnish) is a Talenom product created for such clients – a ‘self-service’ app that combines accounting and banking. It launched the accounting features in October 2020. The banking element arrived in April and will be rolled out to customers throughout this year. Without guidance from PPS – the enabler of this enabler – Accounting Alex would have taken a decade, rather than two years, to achieve, says Miikka Hätälä, who helped develop and launch the standalone service and endearingly goes by the job title ‘Dad of TiliJaska’. “Our story began in 2019, when our CEO, Otto-Pekka Huhtala, and I started to look at fintechs. We had zero know-how – no idea about PSD2 legislation or banking-as-a-service. PPS taught us everything we needed to build this awesome solution.” A lack of electronic bank statements (or, when they were available from a Finnish bank, the high cost incurred in getting them) was a barrier for SMEs who wanted to adopt digital tools. That was the first challenge to overcome, says Hätälä.
Meet ‘The Enablers’ PPS, Talenom and Sprive are three very different financial services but they have more in common with each other than they do with traditional banking models. They are all enablers of modern finance, and Ray Brash, Miikka Hätälä and Jinesh Vohra appreciate the power in their partnerships 24
TheFintechMagazine | Issue 21
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