The Finland-based web bank Holvi, which recently gained a license to operate across Europe, is testing an application programming interface (API) that will make it possible to integrate with other services such as Dropbox and Mailchimp.
I last covered Holvi a couple years back, when it was preparing for its European rollout. The bank offers a comprehensive package of team-friendly services including web stores, payments, invoicing, budgeting and so on, and is touting for business among makers, freelancers and small businesses. As accounts can be set up quite quickly, it’s also good for projects (the Slush Festival has long used Holvi.)
Holvi CTO Tuomas Toivonen gave me an example of the kinds of integration users can expect: A fashion blogger may put a Holvi widget into the blog so she can sell merchandise online. When she does so, she will receive both the money and information about the transaction – who bought, what they bought – and will then be able to automatically add the purchaser to her Mailchimp list for further marketing. A copy of the resulting receipt could then go straight into her Dropbox account.
A Finnish crowdfunding platform called Mesenaatti.me has already been built on top of Holvi, taking advantage of its transparency option – in a very Finnish spirit of openness, Holvi accounts can be used to demonstrate to contributors exactly where their funds are going. Holvi CEO Johan Lorenzen hopes the bank will serve as a platform for many more businesses, and the firm is working on adding new modules for things like peer-to-peer loans.
Before May this year, Holvi was only available in Finland, but now that it has its pan-European license it is taking on early customers in 19 other countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
It is a proper bank, with its own license; others in this space, such as Simple (which was bought in February by Spanish bank BBVA), have tended to launch with proper banks as partners. This is why Holvi took so long to roll out across Europe – as Lorenzen told me, the “long and hard route” of getting independently licensed “shows why so many people are talking about this and so few are doing it.”
Now it’s gathering feedback from its early users and working on localization – it’s also hired staff in Ireland, Austria and Spain to further this aim.
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