the first instance of a major bank sharing data with third parties on a large scale, and served as an early example of what future data-sharing initiatives might look like, according to Dominique Samson, at the time Flinks’s COO. At the time, Samson said the startup hoped to bring other banks onto its platform, creating a larger open banking ecosystem—and potentially putting pressure on other banks to allow their own customers to share data.
Another way National Bank has been looking to do business with fintechs is through a banking-as-a-service platform called Finaptic that had been under development since 2020. The bank was initially the sole investor in the platform, which offers white-label financial services to other businesses.
One more area where fintechs will continue to rely on banks’ back-end infrastructure, at least for the time being, is in payments. Most fintechs are currently from accessing Canada’s national payment systems directly. Financial institutions, however, which meet the legal requirements for using those systems, are allowed to process payments on behalf of customers.a participant last July in Canada’s Automated Clearing Settlement System, a payment network for processing retail transactions.
“This change opened the payments ecosystem, and allows for more competition in the payments industry in Canada,” Peoples Trust said in a statement at the time.