German bank Deutsche Bank on Tuesday announced that it has acquired Quantiguous Solutions, a Mumbai-based fintech startup which offers API-based banking solutions, to strengthen its Global Transaction Banking franchise.

Quantiguous was an early stage bootstrapped startup founded in 2014 by Akhilesh Kataria and Ajay Rana. Both the co-founders are ex-employees of iFlex, now called Oracle Financial Services Software. Quantiguous was launched to offer open banking solutions to banks.

In January, Quantiguous co-founder Akhilesh, who is also CEO of the startup, had met officials of Deutsche Bank for a sales pitch in order to get them on board as a client but it eventually turned into an acquisition. The startup also counts Yes Bank, RBL Bank and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), as its clients.

As part of the acquisition, Deutsche Bank will take over all employees of Quantiguous, who will join the core team responsible for the development and roll-out of the transaction bank’s global API programme. The bank and Quantiguous didn’t disclose the value of the transaction.

Notably, in Europe, the governments (including Germany) have decided that “traditional” banks are un-competitive and slow, thus they have mandated to banks to implement open banking platforms. And, this is where startup like Quantiguous can create a million-dollars opportunity to build an Open Banking platform on a global scale.

“This acquisition significantly ups the game for Deutsche Bank’s Open Banking strategy. The injection of this high-quality talent pool from Quantiguous into the bank’s digital franchise will help us go to market faster”, said Thomas Nielsen, Chief Digital Officer, Global Transaction Banking at Deutsche Bank.

“We are excited to become part of Deutsche Bank. This is a remarkable opportunity for us to build an Open Banking platform on a global scale, with an international bank that is committed to the concept of Open Banking. We have always believed that this is the foundation for a connected financial ecosystem”, added Akhilesh Kataria, Founder and CEO, Quantiguous Solutions.

Quantiguous has its flagship product called ServiceFirst, which is an easy to use, request tracker, integrated with core banking system enabling quick straight through processes. A first of its kind Ruby on Rails application, that's in production since 2014 at a fast growing bank in India.

'Open banking' is the opening up of bank financial data, with consumer consent, to trusted third parties by opening up application programme interfaces (APIs) to them. Open Banking or API Banking and is fundamentally changing the retail banking landscape across the globe.

In India, too, open banking has made its presence felt through the government’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), developed by NPCI.

Indian government officials are taking steps to introduce the Open Banking trend after it implemented a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) -- IndiaStack -- in 2016 and launched the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) to accept payments from any bank.

Source - Economic Times | Top Image - Akhilesh Kataria @Linkedin Pulse
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