Fintech ‘middleware’ Bud launches new exchange

The firm is eyeing a pivotal role in the new Open Banking framework.

Bud, the middleware fintech with over 80 financial partners, wants to ‘open up’ Open Banking.

To do that, the start-up has today announced the launch of Bud Exchange, an attempt to combine ‘all the Open Banking capabilities through one portal’. The announcement was made by Jamie Campbell, Bud’s head of awareness, at a fintech conference this morning.

Broadly speaking, the exchange has two uses.

The first is to allow fintech firms and banks to access APIs to integrate with a wide range of third-party service providers, spanning such things as wealth management, insurance, and so on. One such partner is major robo-advisor Wealthify.

The second use is to allow partners to access transactional data under the Open Banking framework. Bud is authorised both as an AISP and PISP.

Speaking to AltFi off-stage, Campbell described the Bud Exchange service as a ‘smart’ version of Open Banking. He gave the theoretical example of a TransferWise partnership, saying that while the money transfer giant wouldn’t necessarily be interested in accessing all of a customer’s transactional data, it would be very keen to home in on their international money transfers (made via banks). The Bud Exchange can provide this filtered view, and Campbell says that this will make Open Banking services cheaper to access.

Bud hopes that the new exchange will help it to become ‘ubiquitous’ within the recently launched Open Banking framework.