Mastercard has entered an agreement to acquire the Danish Fintech company Aiia (formerly known as Nordic API Gateway), a leading European open banking technology provider offering a direct connection to banks through a single API, allowing its customers to develop and launch new digital solutions that meet the needs of everyday life, work and play.

“The value of open banking comes through empowering consumers and businesses to use their own data to obtain financial services solutions simply, securely and quickly. The addition of Aiia anchors our European open banking efforts and allows us to continue to meet our customers where they are,” says Craig Vosburg, Chief Product Officer, Mastercard. “

Today, Aiia’s open banking platform and expertise, including strong API connectivity and payment capabilities, has shown significant growth coupled with a relentless focus on quality. Aiia has brought to life a unique model for open banking in Europe, driven by data privacy, security, quality and access. Its customer-centric approach and ambition to create open banking that simply works complements Mastercard’s existing distribution channels, technology and data practices.

“For the past decade, we have worked to build Aiia into a leading and quality-driven open banking platform, which has onboarded hundreds of banks and fintechs onto safe and secure open banking rails. We have worked closely alongside banks, customers and local authorities to ensure that our APIs show the true effect of open banking. We’re excited to become a part of Mastercard and progress our journey of empowering people to bring their financial data and accounts into play – safely and transparently,” says Rune Mai, CEO & Founder, Aiia.

“We have been very satisfied with our co-ownership and partnership with Aiia, which has helped to create user-friendly open banking solutions for the benefit of our customers. We are pleased that Mastercard sees the potential in Aiia and are convinced that they will be the right future owner to support the development of the company and Aiia’s ambitions for European expansion. We look forward to the continued collaboration with Mastercard/Aiia on solutions that support open banking and that provide real value for Danske Bank’s customers across the Nordic markets,” says Glenn Söderholm, Head of Personal & Business Customers, Danske Bank.

Benjamin K Golding, Group Executive Vice President, Payments & Innovation, DNB also adds, “DNB Ventures aims to contribute growth and value in companies that with time can succeed within areas relevant to DNB. We have been investors in Aiia since 2018 and DNB is also an important customer of the company. We are very pleased with Aiia’s development, while with the company entering a new phase it is natural for us as venture investors to exit, given our focus on early-stage investments and value creation through capital, knowledge and input to strategy and business development. With Mastercard as owners, Aiia will benefit from a strong global platform positioned for continued growth, and we are looking forward to continuing our business relationship with Mastercard/Aiia going forward.”

Aiia and its shareholders were advised by Zenith Advisory and Danske Bank as financial advisors and Accura as legal counsel.

About Aiia

Aiia was founded by Rune Mai (CEO) and Guðmundur Hreiðarsson (CTO). They built Aiia on the foundation of Spiir A/S – The most popular money app in Denmark with more than 400,000 users. Since 2010, the goal with Spiir was to create an intelligent app that automatically helps people to live the life they want with the money they have and to make personal finance less boring and more fun. That’s why they built Aiia as an easy plug-and-play solution. A single API that connects you to all the Nordic banks and gives you accounts and transactions data from real users.

Aiia won the award for Best Mobile Payment Solution at Finovate Awards in 2020 for live open banking payment solutions built with its customers.