Danske Bank invests in personal finance app Spiir

Danske Bank has made a multi-million krone investment in Danish account aggregation and budgeting app Spiir in preparation for the advent of Open Banking under the EU’s new Payment Services Directive (PSD2).

Founded in 2011, more than 200,000 Danes today use from Spiir to manage their budget, monitor their spending and find less expensive alternatives for their fixed expenses.

For the account aggregation element, Spiir has set up its own Nordic API Gateway ahead of the incoming PSD2 Directive as a data sharing utility for banks in advance of the development of individual bank API platforms.

The Gateway is an attractive proposition for Danske Bank, which is currently building its own sandbox for developers to play with its APIs ahead of a proper launch along the lines of the UK model at a later date.

Rune Mai, Spiir CEO, says: “With Danske Bank to back us, we now have the opportunity to accelerate the development of both Spiir and Nordic API Gateway. The partnership represents a benefit for consumers because they can use their data where it makes sense, but also for businesses, where one can, for example, imagine liquidity management or accounting solutions that automatically perform reconciliations with a bank.”