How Horde creates better conditions for Norwegian consumers with open banking

March 12, 2021 | Louise Basse

Based in Bergen, Horde is one of Norway’s largest and fastest-growing fintechs with more than 150,000 users. Set to create better conditions for Norwegian consumers, Horde enables its users to take full control of their finances and debt.

Horde recently partnered with us to power these features with our payment and data aggregation platform. We sat down with CEO Alf Gunnar Andersen to talk about how Horde has used open banking to build better products for its users and create fairer conditions for the Norwegian consumers.

A new generation of financial services   

As the name implies, Horde acts as a guardian of the consumer. The app was created to give Norwegian consumers a full overview of their finances and debt, calculate better loan conditions and make banks and credit cards more cost effective by consolidating several loans into one. 

To do that, Horde recently started using our open banking platform, and now Horde’s users are not only able to see all of their accounts and credit cards in the Horde app, but also manage loans and receive better loan opportunities by consolidating credit card debt.

Because credit card debt often involves significantly higher interest rates than regular bank loans, Horde’s platform is set to create a whole new generation of financial services that operate on the conditions of the consumer.

Introducing social lending 

But Horde doesn’t stop there. To push the financial industry even further, Horde recently introduced the lending feature ‘Vennelån’ (friend loan), which makes it both easy and safe to manage loans between friends and relatives, as most of us will either receive or give a loan to family or friends during our lifetime. However, these loans aren’t always structured or formalised in a proper way, and can end up creating friction in the long run.

With a pioneering approach and the use of open banking, Horde has now found a way to combat this issue by expanding its product line with the feature ‘Vennelån’ (friend-loan), Alf Gunnar explains: 

“With this new feature, we’re using open banking to structure and facilitate loans between friends and family by using account aggregation and payment initiation, which will basically make it easier than ever to do social lending. We believe it'll be a stepping stone to opening a new chapter for Horde and empowering Norwegian consumers even further with new loan opportunities.”  

Choosing the right open banking platform 

To make sure the new use cases actually work, it’s important to choose the right open banking partner, says Nordic API Gateway CEO, Rune Mai: 

“We’re happy that Horde chose our open banking platform due to the proven quality of our service. It’s not a breeze in the fragile world of open banking to make a decent piece of craftsmanship as we’ve done with Nordic API Gateway. This is yet another testament to our platform and approach to open banking that actually works,” he concludes. 

Do you want to know how you can power your solution with open banking to create better services for your users? Reach out to our team with your use case or head over to our open banking blog for more inspirational use cases and trends.