Nordea Launches Open Banking Tool For Corporate Clients

Nordic financial services firm Nordea is introducing a new solution to provide corporates with a streamlined financial reporting solution powered by Open Banking.

In an announcement this week, the company said its API-enabled Instant Reporting tool has launched, linking Nordea to third-party solutions that allow corporate users to gain real-time access to financial data across systems. The rollout comes about a year after Nordea introduced its Open Banking platform, which links developers to a suite of APIs to facilitate data connectivity into their own platforms.

“We have been committed to Open Banking from the beginning because we could really see the potential for creating new products and services that bring value to our customers,” said Nordea Open Banking head Gunnar Berger in a statement. “The exciting thing with our new product, Instant Reporting, is that it gives corporates the chance to directly access their real-time data, which will have a big impact on the way they organize their business, freeing up valuable time and resources.”

In another statement, Nordea head of transaction banking Erik Zingmark described Instant Reporting as “the first real commercially viable product” from the company’s Open Banking platform, adding that it “has the potential to benefit many customers.”

Last year Nordea released its Future of Payments report, urging the corporate payments industry to become standardized across banks.

The current market, the company’s report said, involves banks using proprietary payment formats, creating a “potential deadlock: Do banks risk losing business by insisting on using their own formats?” Or do corporates limit their choice of bank by insisting on their preferred format?”

The ISO 20022 payments messaging format can be an instrumental component to global payments standardization, particularly as industry heavyweights like SWIFT promote its adoption.

“Over the next four or five years, we expect the experience of corporate payment users to differ in three key ways compared with today,” Nordea’s Head of Cash Management Customer Solutions Claus Richter said in a statement at the time. “First, payments will be faster and often real-time. Second, there is likely to be more choice, and therefore more complexity, in payment partners, including both banks and third parties. Third, we expect to see more intelligence analytics and value-added services beyond the payment itself.”