Last week we tried out a new format and asked for your feedback. Let’s just say you fail and you learn. Back to our regular format:

It seems like the last months PSD2 debacle has paid off: The Financial Supervisory Authority in Norway are following up on all the banks that don’t have interfaces and solutions for PSD2. The investigation is, allegedly, not started because of last month’s debate. 

At the same time, the Financial Supervisory Authority has launched a report stating that the economic effects of the pandemic are still uncertain, and something that the bank and insurance companies must take into account. They fear that the banks haven’t considered that there could be more losses and that Norwegians have a historically high debt ratio. Two years ago, Norway launched a debt register so that the banks could get a better overview of their customers’ debt. Unfortunately, the register only includes consumer loans and other unsecured credit, but large debt items such as mortgages are excluded. This is hopefully about to change when this now is going up for votes in Stortinget.

Two weeks ago, we talked about the article “The bank bluff” - shedding light on the fact that changing banks in Norway are meaninglessly complicated. Finance Norway followed up with the awkward response «Bank switching has never been easier,» comparing the process with changing banks in France. Henriette Høilund-Kaupang in Netlife then told her story about switching banks, pinpointing user experience challenges along the way. 

Stein Vidar Loftås, Head of Communications in Sparebank1 Nord-Norge, believes more straightforward bank swaps can give even higher customer satisfaction and benefit the banks. We wholeheartedly agree.

Stripe’s goal has long been clear: building the economic infrastructure for the Internet. This week we saw the first steps in this massive undertaking when they launched both Stripe Treasury and Stripe Capital. Let’s dive a bit deeper into each of them:

Stripe Treasury is a banking-as-a-service API that lets customers embed financial services in their marketplace or platform. More specifically, Stripe is not a bank, but a platform for creating accounts at their partner banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Stripe offers an abstraction layer that connects different sides of a market, the banks on one side and platforms (like Shopify) on the other side. This enables customers to create accounts in minutes - a process that previously took five and a half-day on average in the US. (By comparison creating a business account in Norway seems to take 1-3 weeks 🤯 based on my recent experience)

Stripe Capital, on the other side, provides platforms with an end-to-end lending API that enables them to offer access to fast and flexible financing for their customers. In this case, Stripe is once again focusing on what they are great at providing an API-layer between banks and other platforms, reaching customers that banks would previously never served. Ben Thompson from Stratechery has done a deeper dive into these announcements in Stripe: Platform of Platforms. 

If this is an exciting subject, you’ll also find 11:FS deep dive into embedded finance engaging.

Apparently, we have something to learn about usability when we use the word Fintech. 😂

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X