Ecospend secures HMRC’s £3m open banking contract

Today, HM Revenue and Customs announced that open banking provider Ecospend was chosen to build-out its next-gen payments infrastructure.

As a reminder, in September HMRC put a £3m contract out to tender to overhaul the group’s bank transfer process for customer payments, with the opportunity for more open banking integration in the future.

Ecospend said its solution would let taxpayers initiate an account-to-account payment without the need to manually set up payments—basically no more annoying reference numbers—which should save time and avoid mistakes.

“Since founding Ecospend, we have spent the last three-years focused on building our underlying technology and API in-house. Because of this, we’re now able to provide the best solutions, such as our account-to-account payment system for HMRC,” said Ecospend CEO and founder Metin Erkman.

“But, this is just the first step, we understand if we’re really looking to deliver on the promise of open banking, innovation needs to happen at an ecosystem level and that’s what we’re here to do.”

The contract win also means that come tax season next year, millions of sole traders and anyone filling in a self-assessment tax return could be prompted to use open banking payments for the very first time.

Ecospend is a 50-person company offering open banking data (AISP) and payments (PISP) and has operated in stealth until now.