Open Banking Co Token Receives $36.5M Investment

Turnkey open banking platform Token has received a $36.5 million investment from a few investors, including Opera Tech Ventures, which is the venture division of bank BNP Paribas. Other investors include banks in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, according to a release by the company.

Older investors like EQT Ventures and Octopus Ventures also took part in the investment. The capital is going to be utilized by continuing the work of TokenOS, which is one of the leading open banking platforms in the world. The company wants to continue to innovate payments solutions using ID and digital money technology.

“Token was founded in 2015 by serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch (FrameMaker, acquired by Adobe Systems and Infoseek, acquired by the Walt Disney Company), who recognized that existing payment rails designed and built before the internet created huge fragmentation and complexity,” the company said. “True digitization in payments would only be achieved by overhauling the core infrastructure, and Token’s mission was to create the next generation of payment capabilities. TokenOS, the company’s open banking platform, enables a global ecosystem of banks, their customers and developers to initiate payments and move money and information securely, instantly and frictionlessly worldwide.”

Right now, there are upwards of 4,000 banks using the platform, and it was recently announced that Token was chosen by Mastercard to help support the company’s connectivity layer on its own open banking hub. Other customers include Khaleeji Commercial Bank, An Post, Think Money Group, Tandem Bank and numerous others.

“As the emerging category leader in open banking infrastructure, Token gives banks a fast track to deliver great open banking customer experiences,” comments Kirsch. “For banks, establishing an early position in this new hyper-connected market is a competitive advantage; a new wave of independent financial apps and services will soon be available to their customers, so banks need to be clear about their future roles. By solving the infrastructure problem, Token enables them to focus on service innovation and delivery earlier than the competition.”

Alastair Mitchell, a partner and investment adviser at EQT Ventures, said that there’s a lot of opportunity with the platform.

“The open banking wave — driven in Europe by PSD2 regulation — is a huge opportunity to create new value propositions for consumers, as well as dramatically improve existing ones,” Mitchell said. “Such a fundamental change in the plumbing behind the movement of money creates big challenges for incumbents and large opportunities for new players to create whole new markets. Token is emerging as the definitive leader in open banking, having been selected by an increasing number of major players as the exclusive technology platform to underpin this new way of doing business. This investment, with the backing of a number of heavyweight global financial institutions, cements the company’s leadership position. EQT Ventures is delighted to support Steve and the team on their journey to transform banking!”