FintechShow winner Aggreg8 is to become the first AISP in Hungary and their first live cooperations shall be announced soon.

At the beginning of summer, our incubated startup, Aggreg8 Ltd. submitted its registration package to the Hungarian National Bank in order to become a registered account information service provider (AISP) as per PSD2-regulation.

(For those who are not quite familiar with PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2): the EU Directive aims to open up new opportunities for non-banking players in the financial industry, by obliging banks to allow access to account and payment-related customer information for authorized third party providers, ideally via dedicated interfaces (API-connections). The directive has come into force on 13 January 2018.)

Aggreg8 has been the very first player in the Hungarian market to start the official AISP-registration. If everything moves ahead as planned, our incubated startup shall soon complete the more-than-challenging registration process.

Apart from this AISP-registration exercise, Aggreg8’s team has been focusing on two main areas: product and business development. In terms of product, they have successfully moved from the previous client-side scraping to the more user-friendly server-side scraping solution. Furthermore, as the first Hungarian banks publish their Open APIs, Aggreg8’s service will be moved to API-based connections. The latest efforts have been focusing on the Hungarian market, but the team has already started to develop its aggregator for the Romanian market.

In terms of business development, the primary objective is to educate non-banking players about PSD2 and how it can help increased competition and better end-user experience in the financial sector. Though PSD2 is much talked about, majority of the existing players are extremely cautious about launching PSD2-based solutions. Having said that, our startup shalll soon be able to announce the very first cooperations. These are expected to be sealed with invoicing platform providers, online payday loan originators and other aggregator websites. Fingers crossed and we shall hear more about these cooperations within couple of weeks’ time!