Finerio Connect, a Mexican fintech, together with Ozone API and Visa announce their collaboration to support financial institutions in Latin America & the Caribbean to navigate open banking. Collectively, the three companies will offer an end-to-end set of tools and capabilities enabling rapid implementations - according to market readiness and compliance requirements.

The term open banking refers to the sharing of consumers’ financial data, with their consent, to trusted third parties that, in turn, create and distribute novel financial products and services.

With that, and as part of Finerio Connect, Ozone API and Visa’s collaboration, the Finerio API Hub will bring together the capabilities of the three partners within a white-label modular solution enabling financial institutions to comply and compete in open banking. It includes the Ozone API platform enabling banks to publish compliant and premium APIs – it also provides access to bank aggregation, data analysis, end-user experiences and other Finerio Connect services. Visa will promote its expertise, capabilities, and value-added services by offering its data assets, APIs, and payment capabilities to develop use cases and innovative solutions and including the offer of Finerio Connect and Ozone API to financial institutions allowing consumers to benefit from open banking.

Finerio Connect was the first company in Latin America to develop open banking solutions and is the leader in providing open banking infrastructure in the region. It offers account aggregation, data handling and a Personal Finance Manager (PFM) app to more than 75 companies in Latin America.

“When we founded Finerio Connect, we realized how difficult it is to implement an open banking solution, but also visualized the impact it can have on the end-user. We created Finerio Connect so that all the knowledge, experience, and infrastructure that we built could be shared with financial institutions. We designed a work plan so they can adopt an open banking infrastructure from day one,” commented José Luis López, CEO of Finerio Connect.

Open banking is a natural evolution of Visa’s 60-year history of being a global payments network that securely connects consumers, sellers, developers, fintech and financial institutions.

“Working with our partners in the ecosystem, our focus in open banking is to foster innovation, bringing our network capabilities and value-added services to facilitate safe and reliable connections for financial institutions to offer consumers more options that allow them to take control of their financials and data,” commented Romina Seltzer, Head of Products & Innovation for Visa LAC. “Now, the ecosystem is beginning to appreciate that open banking also provides an opportunity for traditional financial services to expand their offering to existing and new customers with products and services that are tailored and relevant.”

Ozone API has played a significant role in open finance around the world. The founding team led the development of the open banking standards in the UK and continues to shape standards around the globe. Ozone API is the leading regulatory API solution in the market that enables banks to move beyond compliance.

“Ozone API has been involved in the development of open finance standards from the very beginning, so we understand where the real complexity is and how to make it work for all parties, banks, the third parties and most importantly end-users,” commented Huw Davies, co-founder and CCO at Ozone API. “We founded Ozone API as we saw how difficult, expensive and time-consuming banks were finding it to deliver high quality, standards-based open APIs.”

Despite the natural benefits of open banking in enabling third-party data access, adoption has been slow in some regions. However, the advantages of enabling optimal open banking implementations have captured the attention of companies like Finerio Connect, Ozone API and Visa which partner to enable the acceleration of open banking initiatives.

Finerio Connect, in fact, was the winner of the 5th edition of the Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) in 2021 and was chosen to represent the region of Latin America and the Caribbean in the world finals where it placed in second place. The VEI is now a network of 8,500 startups around the world and growing. Since its 2015 launch, the program has helped startups in more than 100 countries collectively raise more than $16 billion in funding, addressing one of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs face in their startup years. Every year, the competition has expanded to include unique startups solving unique problems in the world of payments.