How you can extract the real value from financial data using Transactions
Financial data can be used to power a range of innovative services and personalised customer experiences. But merely having access to financial data isn’t enough. To put it to work and start reaping the rewards, the data needs to be refined. Luckily, Tink’s new product takes care of all of it. Here’s how Transactions works, and what you can do with it.
Financial data can be used to power a range of innovative services and personalised customer experiences.
When it comes to leveraging financial data, connectivity is not enough. The data should also be refined so it can actually be used.
Tink’s Transactions product, which can be easily integrated through one link, provides access and high-quality coverage, while also cleaning up and categorising the data.
While it might still sound like a buzzword to some, being ‘data-driven’ has become key to success in the digital age. Businesses that can leverage customer data to inform decisions and optimise their offering have been disrupting entire industries and changing consumer expectations – think Amazon, Google, Spotify, Netflix.
While today’s tech giants have been putting data at the centre of their business model for decades, the financial sector has taken longer to look to data as a way to fuel product innovation. But that’s changing, and fast.
Regulations like Europe’s PSD2 are opening up the floodgates by letting everyone tap into financial data (with consumer consent). And while having reliable access to financial data is fundamental for any business looking to leverage it – connectivity by itself is not enough.
To extract the real value from data, and actually be able to use it to bring value to customers (and your business), you need a combination of high-quality coverage, data standardisation, and a good developer experience.
That’s where Transactions comes in.
Accessing real-time transaction data
With Tink’s new Transactions product, you can access real-time transaction data from more than 3,400 financial institutions across 18 European markets. What’s more – the data is cleaned up and unified, so you can easily use it to power better digital experiences. (But more on that below.)
Using Transactions, accessing users’ financial data becomes as smooth as it gets. It lets you gather all a user’s account information, balances, and transaction data – from multiple bank accounts – in a single view.
That’s high-quality coverage taken care of. But as we mentioned before, it’s not quite enough. So Transactions also adds value to the data by making it easier to understand – and to use.
Going beyond connectivity with value-added data
So here’s why connectivity by itself isn’t enough: raw data is often messy, and hard to understand. And if you can’t understand it, you can’t really use it.
Raw transaction data often contains duplicate entries, long complicated strings of texts and a whole lot of numbers with very little context – which can turn a valuable amount of data into something that’s essentially useless.
Transactions solves that, because Tink cleans and refines the financial data in the background. So instead of a messy jumble, you get standardised data that can immediately be put to use.
As part of the standardisation process, Tink can detect new and changed transactions, clean up the description and categorise the data, giving more context and a richer understanding of transactions. And because it follows a unified format, the data is immediately useful, giving valuable insights you can use to improve your product or service.
A good developer experience
Transactions is delivered through a front-end SDK called Tink Link, which makes your integration to Tink essentially one line of code.
By implementing Transactions into your product flows, the end-user will be asked to connect their account(s) and authenticate to their bank. Once consent is given, Tink fetches the accounts’ data and then refines the data in real-time so it’s instantly ready to use.
Tink manages all of the connections and authentication – and the complexity that comes with it. This lets you focus on building great products instead of worrying about infrastructure maintenance.
When it comes to building great products, Transactions can be used in many different ways, to solve different pain points throughout the customer journey. Here’s an example from one of our customers.
MyBudget’s improved income and expenditure assessments
MyBudget, a product from OpenWrks, wanted to make income and expenditure assessments more engaging, fast and accurate – skipping the long phone calls, endless forms and outdated figures.
Using Transactions, MyBudget can quickly get a holistic view of customers’ finances based on their real-time transaction data. Transactions connects and collect users' financial data from multiple sources and then cleans and categorises the data so they can extract the real value and insights to provide budget advice and in turn, help end-users manage debt.
But of course, this is just an example. Transactions can be used for a range of applications, from giving more holistic overviews in financial management apps, to powering credit and risk models – or even carbon footprint calculators.
Start building right away
The latest addition to our product catalogue, Transactions is an end-to-end solution with an integration that’s as simple as adding a link in your product flow.
Check out our documentation to learn more about Transactions. Or if you want to try it out for yourself, sign up for a free account to start building with the Tink Platform.
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