Tink’s meteoric 2018 growth – and why it matters

5 min read|Published December 21, 2018
Tink’s meteoric 2018 growth – graph

A year of sprinting and scaling has put 2018 in the books as Tink’s best year yet. We’re sharing our journey – proud of what we’ve achieved in three major areas, and excited for even bigger growth in 2019.

TL;DR – Quick summary

TL;DR – Quick summary

All-in with market coverage

This year, we expanded to 9 markets – a number that makes us quite proud. But the number doesn’t mean much if we don’t talk about how that growth transforms the ability of our banking and fintech partners to offer better services to their customers.

This year, we made huge strides in building the rails and the brains of open banking. The rails being the infrastructure – aggregation (AIS) and payment initiation (PIS) – that allows our partners to adopt and adapt to open banking. The brains being our data enrichment and personal finance management (PFM) services that create value through great customer experiences and drive profitability.  

It means that banks and fintech unicorns can roll out better financial products across 9 markets (and growing each month). It means they can implement one platform and one API – without the need for complex integrations and multiple partners for each service in each country. It means they can more efficiently enter new markets and quickly offer products using our tech.

This is now. Fast-forward one year – and we’ll cover Europe.

All-in with developers

In May, we launched a self-service version of our platform in the Nordics that allows us to serve small fintechs and developers. Think of it like a try-before-you-buy model. Thousands have already gotten access to our entire product offering – as part of a freemium model – and they’re trying it out. Experimenting. Innovating. And building the future of financial services on Tink tech.

It means that even the smallest of start-ups can create an account and get access to all four of our products – to discover, evaluate and implement. Of course, we want them to become paying customers – we want them to grow and become the next Revolut, Monzo or N26. They do too.

But mostly we want to put our tech into the hands of small companies or open source communities, where so much of the innovation in our sector is coming from. And it’s a collaboration; working at this scale helps us learn things faster and iterate our products quickly.

All-in with retail banks – and their customers

At the end of 2017, we said to the banking world: “We’re open for business”.

Since then, our list of bank partners grew by 10x – adding the likes of Klarna (60 million customers), BNP Paribas Fortis (5 million), and Nordea (10 million) to our ranks. We built a 15-person customer success team to support them, as well as a robust support team to man the ship 24/7.

This is all great for us as a company – it gives us our mandate to keep scaling, to keep growing, and to continue perfecting the underlying technology we’ve spent the last six years building: our aggregation, data enrichment, PFM and payment initiation capabilities.

But expanding our focus also means we can keep doing what we’ve always done – offering the most valuable, insightful and engaging experience – for millions instead of thousands. It means helping the banks make their customers feel taken care of and understood.

A year of sprinting and scaling has put 2018 in the books as Tink’s best year yet. We’re sharing our journey – proud of what we’ve achieved in three major areas, and excited for even bigger growth in 2019.

All-in on everything – in 2019

Next year, we are doubling down again. Double the number of markets – from 9 to 20 – allowing us to offer true pan-European coverage, and even go beyond. Double our staff from 130 to over 260 to keep developing, perfecting our platform and data services. Every one of our clients – bank, developer, current, future – will benefit from our growth in every direction.

We have always believed that the really innovative stuff we’ve all built over the years would change the world – even if others haven’t always shared that belief. But now we’re starting to see the proof that it’s working – that we’re changing the conversation so it’s about making money finally work for everyone.  

Now that we’ve laid the rails – the infrastructure that makes all of this possible – it’s time to expand that across the continent (and beyond), and become the platform for financial services, where you can pick and choose what you need.

Last year we started sprinting – and we’re not stopping anytime soon.

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