Santander Consumer Bank launches PFM app based on open banking

March 30, 2021 | Louise Basse

With more than 1.5 million customers across the Nordics, there’s no doubt that Santander Consumer Bank has a leading market position in the Nordic region. To build a forward-thinking, personal finance management (PFM) app that anyone can use to get full overview of their finances, Santander Consumer Bank recently partnered with our open banking platform. 

We sat down with Oskar Karlsson, who’s the Product Manager for open banking at Santander Consumer Bank, to talk about how one of the most prominent players in the financial industry decided to empower customers – and non-customers – with a PFM app that’s set to boost financial awareness. 

Meet Prosper. A PFM app centered on open banking.

To deliver on its promise to build user-centric services, Santander Consumer Bank recently launched its new PFM app, Prosper. As the name implies, Prosper is on a mission to empower users to be financially successful. 

To obtain financial peace of mind and prosper with the finances you have, Prosper is a ‘financial friend’ that gives users a complete overview of their finances, no matter how many bank accounts they may have and regardless of where they bank. 

Oskar Karlsson explains: 

“With Prosper, we’ve done our absolute best to build a service for both Santander customers and non-Santander customers, as we want to help as many as possible get an overview of their financial life in one app across any bank,” he says. Oskar goes on to explain how Prosper is powered entirely on open banking: 

“Open banking has opened the door to a new generation of financial services that is more user-centric than ever before. Now consumers have more freedom to choose between better products. At Santander Consumer Bank, we see open banking as a positive chapter full of new opportunities and Prosper is one of the new solutions we can create with open banking.” 

Choosing open banking that simply works 

But how do you choose the right open banking partner to make sure your services actually work from day one? According to Oskar, it’s all about coverage and data quality: 

“When we started to look for an open banking platform to power Prosper, it quickly became clear that Nordic API Gateway had high-quality data coverage  and would be a great partner. At the same time, it became obvious that our strategies were aligned, which made it a smart choice,” he says. 

With the new partnership, Santander Consumer Bank has been able to launch its new service faster than ever before. Oskar explains: 

“Because Nordic API Gateway includes data aggregation, categorization and cloud storage in one simple service, it’s been a lot easier for us to deploy new functionalities and services at a faster pace than ever before. For our users, it has a huge impact as well, as we’ve been able to create a super fast PFM app with close to no waiting time,“ he concludes. 

Prosper is already being rolled out in Denmark and later across the rest of the Nordics. 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.