open-finance
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Codat wants your bank to read between the ledger lines
After years connecting business software, Codat is teaching commercial banks what to do with the data. Its next test is whether better information makes for a better conversation.
Moneyhub left the app business. Your bank is its next screen.
The British fintech is trading its consumer storefront for a place inside banks, lenders and pension apps. Its pitch starts with a surprisingly expensive problem: financial data that nobody can quite make sense of.
Juan Luis Pérez Escobar Is Connecting Latin America’s Payment Islands
A lawyer from Montería spent years learning how rules and businesses fit together. Now he is building the connective tissue that lets money move between banks, businesses, and borders in real time.
Jelou Wants to Run a Bank Inside Your WhatsApp Chat
In Latin America, hundreds of millions of people run their lives inside a chat window. A Guayaquil-born startup just raised $10 million to make that window verify identity, sign contracts, and approve loans - without anyone leaving the conversation.
Mastercard
The famous circles sit on billions of cards, but Mastercard's real product is the invisible choreography behind a payment - a global network now learning to serve bank accounts, virtual cards, stablecoins and shopping agents without losing the trust that made the plastic useful.
Klickl
Klickl is a regulated Web3 open-finance platform headquartered in Abu Dhabi that bridges traditional banking and digital assets. Founded in 2017, it offers crypto trading, custody, payments, multi-currency accounts, cards and OTC services under licenses from Abu Dhabi's ADGM, Poland (VASP/EU) and the US (FinCEN MSB). In December 2024 it raised a $25M Series A at a $125M valuation to expand across the MENA region and other emerging markets.
NymCard
NymCard is an Abu Dhabi-based embedded finance and payments infrastructure company that lets banks, fintechs, telecoms and enterprises launch and run card programs, lending and money-movement products through a single API-first platform called nCore. Founded in 2018 by Omar Onsi, it owns its issuing and switching technology rather than licensing it, is licensed by the Central Bank of the UAE, and is a certified partner of Visa and Mastercard across the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan.
Tarabut
Tarabut (formerly Tarabut Gateway) is the MENA region's first and largest regulated open banking platform, connecting a network of banks and fintechs through a universal API. Founded in Bahrain by Abdulla Almoayed and now headquartered in Riyadh, the company provides banking-as-a-service, embedded finance, account-to-account payments, and data-driven credit tools that let financial institutions and businesses build personalized financial products across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.
Method
Method is a financial connectivity platform that lets developers link, read, and repay a consumer's credit and liability accounts - credit cards, student loans, auto loans, mortgages and more - through a single API. Using only a phone number, Method connects to 20,000+ financial institutions, surfaces real-time balances, payoff quotes and due dates, and moves money directly to creditors. It powers embedded lending, refinancing, balance transfers and debt payoff for fintechs and lenders including SoFi, Aven, Bilt, Happy Money and Figure.
N5 Now
N5 Now is a Buenos Aires-founded software company built specifically for the financial industry. Its 'systematics' platform - along with AI products AIfred, Pep and Singular - lets banks, insurers and payment companies connect CRM, campaigns, analytics, compliance and omnichannel operations on top of existing legacy systems instead of replacing them. Founded in 2017 by former Santander executive Julian Colombo, N5 works fully remotely across teams in dozens of cities, serves clients including Santander, Mastercard, Itau, Interbank and Zurich in roughly 15-18 countries, and closed a $20M Series A in 2025 to accelerate its AI agents for banks.
Jose Bethancourt
Jose Bethancourt is the co-founder and CEO of Method Financial, an API platform that lets fintechs and lenders connect to and manage consumers' liability accounts - credit cards, student loans, auto loans and mortgages - using only a phone number. Raised near the Texas-Mexico border in one of the poorest counties in the U.S., he studied computer science and business at UT Austin, co-founded the student-loan startup GradJoy through Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch, then pivoted the team's account-connectivity frustrations into Method in 2021. Method now serves more than 80 fintech clients including SoFi, Robinhood and Credit Karma, has processed over $500 million in payments, and raised a $41.5M Series B in January 2025 led by Emergence Capital. Bethancourt was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list in 2026.
Argyle
Argyle is a consumer-permissioned verification platform that pulls real-time income, employment, and asset data straight from the source - payroll systems and bank accounts - through an API and no-code console. Instead of faxed pay stubs and HR phone calls, lenders, background screeners, and tenant screeners get instant, direct-source verifications covering roughly 90% of the U.S. workforce. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York, the company has raised over $100M from Bain Capital Ventures, Rockefeller Asset Management, Mastercard, Checkr, and SignalFire.
Shmulik Fishman
Shmulik Fishman is the founder and CEO of Argyle, a New York fintech that turns messy workforce and payroll data into a single consumer-permissioned API used by 300+ clients including Mastercard, SoFi, and LendingClub. A Hampshire College philosophy major turned operator, he co-founded the fleet-software company Stratim (acquired by KAR Global) before starting Argyle in 2018. He has raised roughly $100M+ and leads with a transparency-first, inbox-zero, early-morning style.