The investment from Mastercard in Konsentus was made through a multi-million-pound Pre Series A financing round led by the payment technology firm and supported by other investors.
The RegTech company provides SaaS-based third party provider (TPPs) identity and regulatory checking solutions to financial institutions to help them to be PSD2 open banking compliant. The start-up claims to be the first API-based permission and consent management solution to serve financial institutions in Europe.
Mastercard Open Banking SVP Jim Wadsworth said: “We see significant potential for the Konsentus service as Open Banking evolves both in Europe and globally. Through its targeted investments in payment technology, Mastercard continues to provide real value in the way it delivers new solutions to its customers and end-users.”
The RegTech company, through a SaaS platform, issues the consent management tokens on behalf of financial institutions in order to help the latter to comply with EU regulation. As a result, the financial institutions can provide open banking services to their customers with the confidence that they are only sending data to regulated TPPs which have the explicit consent from customers to use their data.
Konsentus CEO Mike Woods said: “The RegTech market is growing at 45%+ per annum and with 9,000+ Financial Institutions in Europe that must deliver PSD2 open banking, the demand for the Konsentus service is significant and this investment will support an accelerated growth plan across Europe.
“With plans to launch new related services later in 2019 and international expansion in due course, we will be pursuing a Series A financing round in late 2019.”
Last month, the RegTech company entered into a partnership with fintech company Neonomics, which enables PSD2-compliant inter-bank communication to thousands of banks through a single unified API.
The partnership will enable Neonomics’ clients to access the Konsentus platform to ensure that they comply with the new payment directive regulations apart from protecting their transaction account customers from unregulated or unauthorised TPPs.
