Invoicing and inventory management software provider SmartBill has partnered with Romania-based Smart Fintech to integrate a Smart Accounts service. As the first local Open Banking service authorised by the National Bank of Romania, Smart Accounts supports the automatic interrogation of bank accounts thus allowing users or accounting companies to instantly connect with the banking data of their customers.

The main benefit of Smart Accounts is that it supports the automation of the entire process of interrogation and aggregation of data from multiple bank accounts. This way, it eliminates the need to operate data manually and repetitively across various applications. Ultimately, this improves the accuracy of financial-accounting activities for SmartBill users.

SmartBill officials cited by business-review. eu highlighted that Romanian SMEs and accounting firms have been increasing the efficiency of their activity for over 16 years through the SmartBill ecosystem. The Smart Accounts integration serves to minimise errors that could occur during manual bank data operations and save precious time.

They also talked about Smart Accounts’ ability to streamline processes for accounting firms in order to allow them to make better use of the time invested in the operational process and develop their client portfolio. The SmartBill platform incorporates security methods designed to protect details such as available funds and transaction history, with relevant information being available only to the bank and SmartBill. Smart Accounts users can only interrogate the accounts’ data with their explicit consent as account holders.

However, this access is used only for reading bank data in order to preserve the security of the accounts. How does the Smart Accounts system work? Every time an account interrogation request is sent from Smart Accounts to the a user’s bank, the latter ensures the validity of the user’s consent. Afterwards, the system verifies the identity of the sender (Smart Fintech), and validation is ensured by third-party provider authorized by the NBR.

By following this process only, the banks return the data requested by Smart Accounts. These verifications are instant and mandatory to ensure the security of users’ data. The result is that Smart Accounts leveraging Open Banking technology is able to eliminate recurring activities that couldn’t have been automated otherwise, even by RPA solutions.

That’s because the interaction with bank applications and banking data is sensitive and must take place in maximum security conditions and with supervision from the NBR. .