Open Banking Gains More Ground As MX Eases Money Movement for Qolo’s Platform

The drive towards open banking gained additional momentum Friday with the announcement Friday of a partnership between Qolo, an omnichannel platform provider to fintechs, and open-banking platform provider MX Technologies Inc.

The partnership, which formalizes an existing working relationship between the two companies that has produced more than 30 joint opportunities in recent months, will enable Qolo to leverage MX’s aggregation services. As a result, Qolo will be able to provide application programming interfaces through its platform that allow users to open and view accounts, make deposits, and move their money, for example. As part of the agreement, Qolo will serve as the payment processor for those transactions.

“When it comes to aggregation services, businesses typically have to integrate directly to a vendor, which creates one more step in the process,” says Darren Beyer, chief product and strategy officer for Qolo. “We are a one-stop shop, and by offering integration to MX’s aggregation platform it streamlines the process of getting new applications to market [for fintechs and neobanks].”

In addition to enabling easier integration to MX, Qolo will use the account data within MX’s open-banking platform to develop fraud-detection tools that can validate an account and determine whether the account has been used for fraudulent activity.

“Those are the kinds of tools you can only develop using the data that you get with account aggregation,” Beyer says. He adds that MX and Qolo have a large number of common customers.

The partnership between Qolo and MX is the latest in a series of recent partnerships between processors and mobile banking providers. In March, MX partnered with Fiserv Inc. to use the processor’s AllData Connect service. A week later, Fiserv followed that deal by partnering with Finicity, a Mastercard Inc.-owned open-banking platform provider, to use its AllData Connect service.

 “Cost efficiency, scalability, trustworthiness — those are the key drivers of innovation that will transform the next iteration of the global financial ecosystem as we lead this revolution with respected partners like Qolo,” Don Parker, executive vice president of partnerships for MX, said in a prepared statement.