To develop its international client portfolio, Bud, an open banking platform, raised $80M in a Series B funding round. The company is known for its embedded financial services, where various fintech technologies are applied to enhance the offerings.
The idea of establishing an open banking platform was to provide a single point of access for consumers to learn and benefit from the fintech services. Later, the model became a viable B2B model for collaborating with other institutions and larger banks to help them enhance customer engagement.
Over time, several financial institutions across Europe started betting big on open banking payments by citing several tangible benefits for both merchants and customers.
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Bud’s CEO and co-founder, Ed Maslaveckas, said, “There’s lots of open banking aggregation players, but there’s very few people that have built good data intelligence, and what we are allowing for is for businesses that work with existing aggregators to use our intelligence services.”
He also highlighted that Bud would use the investment for international expansion and R&D. Specifically, it will cater to building on AI-based tools. Besides the vital area of focus, Bud will also contribute a part of the raised money to enhance categorization, income verification, and merchant recognition.
Such advances in the banking sector have less to do with banks ingesting more data from external sources but more with them being able to access what is sitting in their corner. Bud believes that the conjugation of open banking data and AI capabilities will enable the lending customers to grow their capacity by around 85% in their affordability assessment.
