Open Banking & Account Data · Use case

Automate accounting and reconciliation with bank data

Scope this use caseTalk to us

Short answer

Business customers connect their bank accounts once; transactions and balances flow into your accounting or finance product automatically, categorised and enriched, so reconciliation becomes matching rather than typing.

What this use case is

Business customers connect their bank accounts once; transactions and balances flow into your accounting or finance product automatically, categorised and enriched, so reconciliation becomes matching rather than typing.

Who builds this

Accounting software
FP&A and cash-management tools
Expense and AP automation
Tax tools

What your customer sees

  1. 1Connects business bank accounts
  2. 2Sees transactions appear daily
  3. 3Matches them to invoices with suggestions
  4. 4Renews access when prompted

How Open Banking & Account Data solves it

1

Business connects accounts with consent

Business connects accounts with consent

2

Provider retrieves balances and transactions

Provider retrieves balances and transactions

3

Transactions normalised and enriched with merchant and category

Transactions normalised and enriched with merchant and category

4

Delivered to your ledger or matching engine

Delivered to your ledger or matching engine

5

Suggested matches shown to the user

Suggested matches shown to the user

6

Consent renewal managed before expiry

Consent renewal managed before expiry

Want to have

  1. Business account coverage
  2. Reliable daily refresh
  3. Normalised transaction data
  4. Merchant enrichment
  5. Webhooks for new data
  6. Consent renewal tooling

Optional

  1. Multi-currency accounts
  2. Card account data
  3. Historical backfill

Design decisions

Categorisation

Provider's
Your own rules and models

speed versus fit with your chart of accounts.

What to put in your RFP

Coverage

  • business banks
  • account types

Data

  • refresh
  • history
  • fields

Enrichment

  • merchant
  • category

Consent

  • renewal flows

Commercials

  • per connected account
Add these to an RFP

How to evaluate providers for this use case

  1. 1Business bank coverage
  2. 2Data freshness
  3. 3Enrichment quality
  4. 4Renewal experience

Pitfalls

  • Coverage strong for retail banks but weak for business banks
  • Silent connection failures
  • Renewal lapses breaking feeds

What providers will ask you

  1. Customer countries and banks
  2. Number of connected accounts
  3. Ledger model

Other Finlane categories that cover parts of this

This use case is solved mainly with Open Banking & Account Data. These categories cover specific parts of it and can be tendered alongside it.

FX & Cross-Border Payments

Multi-currency account data

Lending & Credit Decisioning

Cash-flow lending using the same data

Frequently asked questions

Other Open Banking & Account Data use cases

Verify income and affordability

Aggregate salary, expenses and balances across a user's accounts to power credit or KYC decisioning.

Add pay-by-bank checkout

Offer instant account-to-account payments as a cheaper alternative to cards, with SCA built in.

Power personal finance and budgeting apps

Give users a unified view of their bank, card and loan accounts with enriched merchant data.

Scope automate accounting and reconciliation with Open Banking & Account Data providers

Scope this use case