Bud shifts Open Banking focus to transactional data for smaller firms

Change in focus after the startup completed a restructuring of its teams last month.

Ed Maslaveckas, the CEO of Open Banking provider Bud, today announced a refocusing of the startup's resources towards SME customers via a new suite of services.

“We started out working exclusively with the largest institutions because that was where most people went to manage their money - but the truth is that a lot of these decisions are taking place elsewhere now,” Maslaveckas told audiences at Wired’s annual Smarter conference.

The new offering comes with a developer portal for smaller businesses to use Bud’s sandbox environment and pricing on a per-user basis, as opposed to larger packages the startup offers to banks.

Last month Bud shed staff from its marketing team while increasing recruitment in sales and engineering, and City AM today revealed this accounted for around 20% of Bud’s headcount.

Bud’s focus for its SME business will be more narrowly aligned on current account access and the parsing of transactional data (including categorisation, merchant identification, and transaction tagging) and the ability to isolate certain regular payments (rent, utility bills, salaries, etc). 

“The truth is, if you’re a startup trying to do something for people using transaction data - right now that cost is prohibitive, both financially and in terms of development time. Intelligence services like this are crucial in challenging that,” said Maslaveckas.

“We should be clear - we’re getting into this market to drive the price and the barriers to entry down so that innovation can happen faster, and ultimately, drive better outcomes for people.” 

The promise of this shift is that it will enable both smaller businesses and new entrants to the market to achieve what has, until now, been the purview of big traditional and digital banks.