Transactionlink Is Creating a Next-Gen Fintech Platform for Building Next-Gen Fintech Platforms

• TransactionLink is a Polish company building a platform for using FinTech APIs.
• The project is intended to let businesses build brand-new FinTech products.
• The company earned a €1.2M investment from Entrée Capital back in November 2020.

I’ve been doing a couple of FinTech specializations on Coursera over the last month, and the latest course finished with an interview with Prakash Neelakantan from Broadridge.

In it, he mentions something that caught my ear.

For him, the future is one where FinTech isn’t FinTech anymore. He proceeds to give e-commerce and video streaming as services that were once an engaging and evocative buzzword, but have since gone on to be subsumed into popular culture and daily life.

For Prakash, that’s the ideal future for FinTech.

So one question that might arise from such a posit is – how? How do we make FinTech – a vast and lightning-fast wedge of industry that covers more different areas than one can keep track of and that develops technology quicker than it can be implemented – something that can be easily brainstormed, prototyped, and deployed?

That’s right – I’m doing that thing where I ask questions, but I actually already have the answer.

Well, potentially, anyway. One option is something like what the Polish startup TransactionLink is doing.

As the company’s CEO and Co-Founder Mateusz Pniewski told us,

“TransactionLink is a platform connecting providers of fintech solutions with their customers. We are an operating system for fintechs, a one-stop-shop to build any fintech product. We provide our clients with a whole range of functions: from all kinds of identity verification tools, such as video verification, ID scanners, through open banking solutions, data enrichment and processing, e.g. credit scoring, to many other functionalities such as debt collection as-a-service.”

What Mateusz is referring to is the coveted API. One thing I’ve learned from studying this field in a more in-depth capacity is that API is the holy grail of FinTech.

APIs are, in a word, what allows different companies’ systems and functionalities to talk to each other. You probably knew what an API was, but you might not know just how many there are and how complicated it can get. There’s a lot. Like, at least 7.

TransactionLink allows for the mixing and matching of a ton of different APIs – Lego-style – in order to build the platform (or indeed, the product) that your business needs to build.

Mateusz adds that,

“Our services can be used by companies offering loans, insurance, apartment rental, leasing or factoring, but also carsharing services or utilities. We join in a global trend in which the consumer interacts with the product, and not necessarily with the bank. As TransactionLink, we are a set of tools that can facilitate activities of almost any type of business. If we were to describe the situation metaphorically, these tools are actually produced by other entities, and we are the center where they are stored and used in a creative way.”

Now, that’s a pretty wild and potentially game-changing idea. And ideas like that are typically either immediately overvalued or take a while to take off – if they ever even do.

But TransactionLink seems to be paving its own way properly and is showing enough promise and progress where it’s already earning the trust of investors.

“Today you can see that global investors believed in TransactionLink because they know that a fintech revolution is inevitable, and we are able to present our clients with a service that is not yet available on the market. In the initial financing round, the company managed to raise PLN 5.5 million from international investors. In the next round, we should obtain additional, several times greater support, which will enable us to further scale up our platform onto European markets. We want every business, even the smallest and not related to finance, to develop quickly and easily compete with the best.”

That PLN 5.5M investment that Mateusz is referring to is the Pre-Seed round back in November 2020 where they raised €1.2M from Entrée Capital. And for what it’s worth, most signs do point to the fact that there will be more down the line.

So they’ve caught the attention of investors – that’s good. But what do their peers in FinTech think?

We reached out to Twisto‘s Product Owner, Bartosz Potrzebowski, for his opinion on TransactionLink. In case you’re not familiar, Twisto is a cash flow management and payment app based out of the Czech Republic.

Here’s what Bartosz had to say.

“TransactionLink’s unique offering can be a real game-changer for early-stage startups whose main strength is agility and speed as they often require constant delivery of new solutions to move a needle on their target markets. Bigger companies and even corporations can benefit from TransactionLink’s technology as well to stay competitive and keep up with the fast pace of smaller firms that are on the hunt for the big player’s customers. TransactionLink has the potential to also be an amazing distribution network for companies that deliver technology solutions to other businesses. Having access to such a network can significantly decrease the time from the ideation to release in any kind of fintech business.”

Twisto operates on what’s known as a Buy Now Pay Later model (or BNPL), a growing trend in e-commerce that essentially offers an easier and oftentimes cheaper alternative to buying stuff with credit.

Bartosz shared what he thinks of that prospect.

“Offering integration with a BNPL service may help TransactionLink build scale and attract new markets. Integration of TransactionLink’s infrastructure can also help the popularization of BNPL services for companies who might have not considered using deferred payments solutions at the moment, as it should be easier to up-sell the BNPL solution on top of already used services, once someone is integrated with TransactionLink.

Probably the biggest challenge would be to create an infrastructure able to efficiently integrate different kinds of services and create a major coverage of the types of needs their potential clients may have.

The next couple of years will show whether TransactionLink can live up to the promise of being a one-stop shop for businesses trying to build their services on top of existing solutions.” Due to the modernization of businesses, people might need to research how to compare options for a merchant account and then decide on a specific payment processing for their business.

So, is TransactionLink the future of FinTech? Sure. If Low-Code platforms are the future of software development, then I can also see platforms like this being a pillar of FinTech development in the very near future – at least for some people. There will always be people that want to do everything themselves and opt for the more “legitimate” approach. But there’s also a ton of small-to-mid-sized companies out there that will jump on this immediately. And of course bigger companies, too – ones that are more interested in efficiency and optimization than trying to impress shareholders over 200.

So, yeah – history has shown that arming companies with the tools needed to develop their own products is a successful business model. And FinTech is one area where the faster we get to “there”, the better.

And who knows – with enough time and technology, maybe even I could become a FinTech.