Happy birthday, Open Banking! Three years have passed by so quickly, and you’ve grown up a lot since then too. 

It has been three years since the introduction of Open Banking as a part of the European Union’s Payment Directive Services 2 (PSD2) on the 13th January 2018. 

Over the last three years, Open Banking has grown immensely. The people behind the transformative legislation started the arduous task of creating competition within the finance industry by opening up banking data to 294 third party providers to-date, with tomato pay being one of them. 

Today, 2.5 million people are utilising solutions that use Open Banking data. This is already up from one million people using Open Banking solutions in January 2020. Furthermore, API calls have also grown significantly from 66.8 million in 2018 to almost 5.1 billion in 2021. 

Opening up data allows fintechs to build better financial products and services for small businesses and consumers. Examples of this could include a business solution that forecasts future payments and provides nudges based on historical banking data. Another example could be providing consumers with a quicker, sanitary, more ethical way of paying small businesses throughout a pandemic. 

It’s remarkable to see how much Open Banking impacts how we conduct our financial tasks. Most people won’t even realise that Open Banking is the magic behind their apps.

So, Open Banking - to honour your third birthday we have listed three ways that you have joined us on our journey at tomato pay:

You have helped us become who we are.

Our mission is to support small businesses and close the £22 billion funding gap that exists in the UK. We have integrated with your technology to build our APIs, to empower our financial partners to provide better services to their small business clients.

You have evolved, and so have we.

With the emergence of Open Finance and the innovation taking place across the payments landscape, we’ve decided to develop a smart QR-based payments solution built on our API suite. To find out more, sign up here.

We have always loved celebrating our journey together.

We have written blog posts, recorded podcasts, spoken at your events and quoted you more times than we can count on social media. 

As Open Banking grows, so will its capabilities. We look forward to our continued journey with industry bodies that lobbies for the opening up of data owned by the user and seeing so many solutions on the market for the majority, not the minority of people.

tomato pay is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office and holds a PIS and an AIS license. You can find out more at the FCA website. 

Community has never been as important as it is today, and watching the business and sole trader community struggle throughout the past year has spurred us on to take a more community-led approach to our business.

tomato pay is a simple, QR-code based payments and invoice app powered by Open Banking and built on our tomato pay API platform which offers both AIS and PIS capabilities.

Businesses and sole traders can benefit from our low-cost QR-code payments solution with no hidden fees, which saves them money compared to their current payment systems, gives them instant access to their money as cash settlement happens almost immediately, and access to all of their bank accounts in one place.

Businesses and sole traders can benefit from our quick and easy invoice solution. Invoices can be created within the app, with the option to give discounts and late penalties (pre-built into the app using gamification and behavioural science) and send nudges to remind customers and clients to pay. Plus, as you connect your bank account, payments are embedded within the app - so no need to give your bank details, and receive money owed instantly into your account.

Everyone can support their local communities thrive by paying their neighbourhood businesses in a cashless, hassle-free way.