Klarna Kosma establishes an open banking autopilot initiative to accelerate open banking adoption and innovation.
The initiative announced by the fintech arm of Klarna seeks to assist startups in developing proofs of concepts (POC) in the e-commerce, data analytics and fintech space.
It comes as a welcomed drive in the development of open banking use cases and will equip companies with access to a product development sandbox. Zero-cost, the sandbox will engage innovators with the Klarna Kosma open banking platform.
The initiative will see a select number of start-ups and established companies work with products on its platform and access a banking network for three months, free of charge.
The offer limits qualifying companies to a maximum of 300 transactions or MAUs per month. Participating companies are to have their use cases validated by a Klarna representative.
Klarna Kosma connects financial institutions, fintechs and merchants to a network of banks spanning 27 countries through a single API.
Since its launch in April of this year, the platform has more than doubled the number of connected banks, and trebled the transactions processed on the platform.
Discussing the launch of the initiative Klarna’s VP of open banking, Wilko Klaassen says open banking was introduced to “wrest control of consumer data away from the big banks” and “make it securely available to drive innovation.”
“With that data accessible through simple APIs, with consumers’ permissions, a whole new vista of potential use cases has opened up,” he continues.
“The initiative we are launching today aims to add rocket fuel to the innovation process.”
As its latest business unit, Klarna Kosma harnesses the growth Klarna has seen in this area, having more than doubled the number of connected banks in the past year.
