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STARTUP OF THE MONTH
Forget blockchain, it’s all about APIs for Token
Marten Nelson, vice president of marketing and co-founder of Token, returns from a busy Money20/20 to tell IBS Journal about how the firm has jumped into the open banking market.
Interview by Alex Hamilton
wasn’t actually suitable, despite the buzz around it. Instead, we developed our own technology for enhancing security, which borrows some of the concepts of blockchain, such as public-key cryptography. We also realised that Europe was leading the way in open banking with legislation such as PSD2 and GDPR. Today we are focused on serving banks of all sizes in Europe with our turnkey PSD2 solution, which offers a single API to all banks and enables them to generate new revenue from open banking.
What’s your business model? your company - how was it founded? I
We started Token in 2015. At the time, we were interested in blockchain and cryptocurrencies as technologies for addressing payments pain points – slow speed, high cost, lack of certainty, difficulties with reconciliation, etc. We quickly realized, however, that blockchain
BS Journal: Tell us about
Our open banking platform, TokenOS, is cloud-based. Banks connect to the service through APIs. As part of the service we also deliver secure customer authentication, a public sandbox, documentation and all the other components required to comply with PSD2. Since this is provided as a service, the business model is subscription based. Through the network of banks, we also offer online merchants a bank direct payment service. Online merchants pay a
low fee to transact on the Token network. Since the merchant is directly engaged with the bank (not via intermediaries like payment schemes or clearing houses) the bank can set lower fees and, at the same time, increase their margin.
What sets you apart from the competition?
Unlike our competitors, Token doesn’t just offer an API
management platform to build the PSD2 APIs. Sure, TokenOS comes with open APIs, but the platform is so much more than that. It also includes identity, security, instant payments and programmable money. By leveraging these capabilities, we’re also able to deliver a suite of applications that delivers instant value to our bank customers. Just like Microsoft and Apple realised that you need a few killer apps for Windows (Word, Excel, etc.) and iOS (Mail, Safari, etc.), we’re building a suite of applications to add fuel to the growth of the platform. Our vision is to move money and information
www.ibsintelligence.com © IBS Intelligence 2017
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