Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) has rolled out a full suite of Banking as a Service (BaaS) products in the US, after its BBVA Open Platform program moved out of the beta stage.
Image: BBVA’s building in Madrid, Spain. Photo: Courtesy of Luis García/Wikipedia.org.
With this launch, BBVA will offer a range of banking products and services to businesses who want to offer financial products to their customers without taking on full banking themselves.
BBVA’s Open Platform enables third parties to easily integrate payments and other banking services into their own business models.
The Open Platform can be used by businesses, after their pass strict compliance and security checks to access through Application Protocol Interfaces (APIs), a range of services the bank can offer.
The Banking as a Service solution allows businesses to connect into a core digital banking platform, through which they can access the APIs such as Move Money, Identity Verification, Account Origination, and Card Issuance services.
BBVA Open Platform CEO Abhishek Gupta said: “The past six months in beta have allowed us to not only prove the market is there for this kind of innovation in the US, but also to ensure the BBVA Open Platform delivers a great experience to our customers.
“Turning this live has been a complex process, because ultimately this is a new service operating in a highly regulated and secure environment. But the potential it will deliver in terms of opening up new lines of business and supporting innovation that can really change the way people and businesses bank, is huge. It’s a real gamechanger.”
The Spanish banking group said that in the future this initiative could enable businesses bringing financial technology ideas to life for both retail and enterprise clients across industry verticals, as it offers easy solution for innovators to bring new ideas and products to market.
After a six month beta period, during which time, several businesses have shown interest in working with BBVA, the service has now gone live.
In addition, companies interested in developing solutions linked to banking’s open APIs can work with the Open Platform team, which is working on a sandbox testing environment.
BBVA Open Platform sales and operations head Brent Baker said: “The move out of beta For Open Platform signals the real start of BaaS in the US, and the culmination of a lot of hard work by the team.
“We are also hugely grateful to all those third party partners who have helped us test the platform and iron out the issues before we went live.”