The new open banking features have gone live in the Netherlands, France and Germany, with plans to scale this throughout Europe. The features allow bunq users to connect all external bank accounts onto their existing app.

Finextra spoke with Bianca Zwart, chief of staff, Bunq, and Bart Willaert, EVP Mastercard.

Zwart comments: “It means that our users can get a full overview of their finances in their app, so they can add any external bank accounts to their app. So that in itself is already quite cool, but we’re adding AI to the mix as well.”

A total of 12.5 million users will have the ability to access these features. Mastercard is providing the open banking side of the equation, with bunq using the AI from their generative AI chatbot Finn, launched at the end of last year.

Willaert adds: “It’s a great use case because it makes it much easier for bunq’s customer to manage your finances. Open banking allows you in a very slick way to share data here. You actually share it in a consented way, but you give it back to the consumers to have an overview. What bunq has done very nicely, is that by using AI, it becomes so easy.”

Looking to the future, Zwart states that the possibilities provided by open APIs are “endless”. She continues: “Especially for our target audience, because we’re making our products for people that live international lives, expats, digital nomads. They live in a reality of having multiple bank accounts or needing to have multiple bank accounts. So we can remove that friction.”

This move also makes bunq first Dutch bank to use open banking. The fintech states this feature has seen a surge in engagement, with nearly 40% of their surveyed users reporting a significant increase in their use of the app within two weeks of launch.