A focus on fintech innovation, open banking attainability, and year-over-year indicator growth marked Wednesday’s Q4 earnings call for the National Bank of Canada (NBC).

The bank reported revenues of $7 billion, up 13% from the previous year. Total assets increased to $277.3 billion, up 7% from the previous year, while earnings per share (EPS) increased 58%. Non-interest expenses stood at $3.7 billion, a 7% increase YoY, related chiefly to increased technology spend and growth in investments for business development.

“Asset growth has been picking up in recent months and we expect double-digit asset growth in 2022. Revenues are expected to be relatively stable in 2022, given the $26 million gain on the sale of our portfolio in the first quarter. This translates into high single-digit revenue growth for 2022, excluding that gain,” Laurent Ferreira, the bank’s president and CEO, said during Wednesday’s call.

The bank also discussed its backing of Canadian fintech Flinks, which offers open banking application programming interface (APIs) and data enhancement capabilities. NBC acquired Flinks in early September, giving the bank an 85.9% equity interest in the fintech.

“For us, it’s our positioning in the fintech market. It’s more of a fintech play. Flinks is a data aggregator that provides services to over 250 fintechs in the Canadian market and the U.S. market. We were early investors in Flinks in 2016 or ’17, and we gradually increased our position,” Ferreira said. “We’re looking at the fragmentation of financial services, the growth that they’ve had during that period of time. So, we obviously think that there’s more potential going forward given that, that fragmentation has really increased in the U.S. and could potentially increase more.”

NBC’s stake in Flinks will allow the aggregator to create an open banking environment (OBE) for its partnering firms. Internal and external developers will be free to access APIs for tool creation, allowing financial information to be accessed in a secure digital environment, speeding up transactions and increasing consumer financial understanding.

“The open banking discussion, it’s at its infancy in Canada but it is happening out there,” said Lucie Blanchet, NBC’s executive vice president of personal banking and client experience, during the call. “So, Flinks being the main data aggregator in Canada, is also very well connected with the current fintech ecosystem that is out there. So certainly, the Flinks acquisition gives us opportunities and also options from an IT perspective.”

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