IBanFirst, Klarna Debut Open Banking For X-Border B2B Payments

Cross-border solution provider iBanFirst will roll out a new open banking service in partnership with Klarna, a Tuesday (June 29) press release said, which will streamline routine payment transactions and give a broad view of a corporation’s bank accounts.

The company plans to allow third-party access to financial data under PSD2 regulations, and the partnership with Klarna will help take advantage of that. This will let iBanFirst give customers more options because their customers won’t have to consider where their account is located or whether their bank is in compliance with PSD2. Because it will be possible to switch connections to banks on and off, this creates what could be called “smart open banking.” That, according to the release, allows for individual solutions for customers.

The partnership with iBanFirst, according to Russ Carroll, global head of open banking at Klarna, was fortuitous because of Klarna’s own ubiquitousness in the open banking space.

“Our rapidly growing coverage of banks and countries combined with iBanFirst’s vision of open banking benefits will support customers with innovative financial services,” Carroll said, according to a Google translation of the release, which was written in German.

Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier, founder and CEO of iBanFirst, said the company has broken some of the boundaries currently impeding cross-border transactions.

“Accessing the data of their external bank accounts and triggering payments on the iBanFirst platform removes another barrier in our customer’s payment transactions,” he said, according to the Google translation of the release. “While they previously had to use external online banking tools to top up their iBanFirst account, they can now fund funds directly … [through] the iBanFirst platform, which will really become … [the] central interface for all foreign exchange transactions.”

PYMNTS interviewed Dusoulier recently, and he said that FinTechs face a steep, uphill climb to getting accepted as a way to handle cross-border payments because many companies simply stick to what they know.

Intermediary banks can also slow cross-border transactions down, even when using similar software to what iBanFirst uses.

Newer FinTech solutions, though, can help with friction and other such issues — it’s just a matter of businesses knowing enough to adopt them in the first place.