BBVA USA reels in 50k new customers with Open Platform

BBVA USA , through its Open Platform , a banking-as-a-service platform launched last October, has secured seven fintech clients, tens of thousands of new customers and $2.6 million in new deposits to the bank. “Through Open Platform alone, we've added close to 50,000 customers to the bank, and those 50,000 customers and their associated deposits and payment transactions would never have come in through traditional retail or commercial banking channels,” said Susan French, head of product at BBVA Open Platform. To put the number in perspective, BBVA on a global basis has 23 million mobile banking users . French said Open Platform has helped expand the bank’s reach beyond its physical branch footprint. The platform allows early-stage and enterprise companies to integrate the bank’s financial services offerings. Through Open Platform, the U.S. arm of Spanish multinational BBVA offers four main APIs: Identity verification; Move money, through which clients can execute custom ACH, bill pay and real-time transfers through a single endpoint; Account origination; and Card issuance. Savings app Digit , which French said is the largest of Open Platform’s current clients, was one of the first third parties to use Open Platform. The fintech firm’s Digit Pay function enables users to create savings goals to pay down credit card debt or other bills. Digit, through its proprietary algorithm, can monitor customer inflows and outflows and determine when it's an appropriate time to siphon off a given amount from a customer's account towards a savings goal. Through APIs, BBVA allows Digit to pull funds out of their customers' bank account and deposit them in a pooled savings account managed by BBVA, and then to pay bills on behalf of their customers or return funds to their customers’ third-party bank accounts as desired. Digit did not respond to a request for comment before deadline. French said Digit is doing a couple hundred thousand transactions a month on Open Platform and has moved about $15 million into and out of BBVA so far this year. Other clients include payments technology fintech Modo and BBVA-backed digital banking startup Azlo. French said another client on Open Platform is building a marketplace for private jet charter services. In total, French said customers on Open Platform are moving a couple of million dollars in payments volume a month. She said the bank expects payments volume to double by the end of 2019. It will add two to three clients a month by 2020. French said the bank sees the platform as more of a customer acquisition channel than a distribution channel for existing customers. “We're working on a couple of other enhancements and payments,” she said. “We're working on the ability to originate domestic wire transfers, and we're working on international cross-border transfers from the U.S. to other destinations outside the U.S. through a combination of push-payment transactions on debit cards outside the U.S. and international ACH.” Read more: A s part of U.S. launch, challenger bank Monzo seeks CEO Open Platform is part of BBVA’s global push to use open APIs more widely in banking. The bank in Europe finalized its compliance with PSD2 requirements in 2017 with the launch of the BBVA API Market in Spain, which currently has 12 banking APIs available for use. Stephen Greer, senior analyst at Celent , said CBW Bank in Kansas and platform banking fintech SynapseFI already offer a similar range of services, but that BBVA appears better at "operationalizing" and going to market with the platform. "They are certainly the largest bank in the U.S. doing it, but not the only one offering BaaS," he said. Similar offerings from Plaid and other aggregators that offer functions like ID verification. For perspective, Plaid has said it integrates with more than 10,000 banks and connects to roughly 20 million consumer accounts. Green Dot is another example of a bank using the BaaS model to attract new customers and revenue through fintech partnerships. The company will invest 60 million in the second half of 2019 for the purpose of “aggressively marketing” new products set to launch over the next year or so, executives announced during Green Dot's first-quarter earnings call in May. This new spending also will advance the development and deployment of its next-generation BaaS platforms .

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