ING pulls the plug on Yolt, shutting down its open banking operation

“ING has concluded that it is not feasible to achieve its ambitions with Yolt”.

Yolt, which began life as a consumer-facing money management app back in 2017, was permanently closed down today by parent company ING.

The Dutch banking giant said that after an evaluation of the business “ING has concluded that it is not feasible to achieve its ambitions with Yolt”.

ING had put Yolt on notice last September when it repositioned the business as ‘Yolt Technology Services’ with a pure business-to-business open banking offering.

The move saw Yolt’s consumer-facing app shut down, to put Yolt in a stronger position to compete with the likes of Plaid and Bud in the competitive open banking market.

At the time Yolt CEO Nicolas Weng Kan said: “Focussing on Yolt Technology Services is a faster and more effective way of driving change.”

However, it now appears ING has made the decision to phase out the brand entirely.

“ING and its businesses continuously evaluate activities, including assessing whether they are likely to achieve the preferred scale in their market within a reasonable time frame. In this context, the evaluation has led to the intended decision to phase out Yolt,” ING wrote in a statement.

In April AltFi reported that Yolt’s long-serving chief business officer Leon Muis, who spearheaded the development of Yolt’s open banking platform, had left the business