SmartBill , an invoicing and inventory management software, has announced the integration of the Smart Accounts service through a partnership with Romanian start-up Smart Fintech . Smart Accounts is the first local Open Banking service authorised by the National Bank of Romania.

It allows automatic interrogation of bank accounts, allowing users or accounting companies to instantly connect with their or their customers' bank data, respectively. Smart Accounts integration allows the automation of the entire process of interrogation and aggregation of data from multiple bank accounts, thus eliminating the need to manually operate data across various applications. Consequently, the accuracy of financial-accounting activity for SmartBill users can increase significantly, as the press release says.

SmartBill representants said that, using their ecosystem, Romanian SMEs and accounting firms have been increasing the efficiency of their activity for over 16 years. With the Smart Accounts integration, they will could save more time and will eliminate errors that may occur during manual bank data operations. How does it work? An example would be reconciling an invoice with a bank collection.

This partnership allows the businesses included in the SmartBill network to connect their accounts to their bank accounts, providing an unfragmented and seamless experience within the program. Enhanced security methods are in place to protect details such as transaction history, available funds, and any other data in the SmartBill platform, the information being transparent only to the bank and SmartBill. Whereas Smart Accounts users can only interrogate the accounts' data with their explicit consent as account holders, access is used exclusively for reading bank data, and these accounts remain entirely secure.

With each account interrogation request from Smart Accounts to the user’s banks, the latter ensures the validity of the user’s consent. Then they verify the identity of the sender (Smart Fintech), validating it is a third-party provider authorized by the NBR. By following this process only, the banks return the data requested by Smart Accounts.

These check-ups are instant and mandatory to ensure the security of users’ data. As a result, Smart Accounts and the Open Banking technology eliminate recurring activities that couldn't have been automated by now, even by RPA solutions, as the interaction with bank applications and banking data is highly sensitive and must occur under maximum security conditions and NBR supervision. SmartBill’s integration with Smart Accounts is a new step in Smart Fintech's plans for the future.

They will continue and launch further automation soon, to optimize and improve user processes. SmartBill also aims to integrate Smart Fintech’s payment initiation solution, SmartPay, for its users and customers as the partnership evolves. .