would need monzo and starling

Would need National Westminster Bank

Hey guys,

Just got word back from Plaid (one of our banking integrators). It seems like adding UK bank coverage is going to take longer than expected and become more complicated than planned.

Why?

• The FCA works a little differently from the EU regulations as they require LicenceOne to create an additional UK entity, rent an AISP certificate from Plaid, and then wait for up to 6 weeks for the FCA to approve our application to rent that certificate.

• Plaid is now requiring that we switch from their pay-as-you-go model ($0.50 per synchronised bank account) to a monthly engagement minimum of $1 000 💸

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  Next steps for LicenceOne

1. We had some Plaid startup credits that we should be able to redeem against that $1 000 monthly minimum. If so, it would essentially remove that item as a blocking point.

2. We're consulting with people in our network that have set up a subsidiary in the UK via a French HQ. We're under no illusions that it'll take more admin work and likely incur extra costs (accounting, mail forwarding etc.).

3. If not allowed to redeem our Plaid startup credits, we'll look at other banking aggregation services (notably Yapily, Truelayer, and Tink) to see if their monthly minimums are more acceptable for UK banking

Objective

For the 25th of May, I want to have a clear yes/no for you guys. If it's a yes, I'll also want to come with a clear implementation date for UK banking implementation.

If it's a no, I want to come with a concrete solution to get UK financial data into LicenceOne (e.g. Xero + Quickbooks integrations, CSV imports etc.).

hi, did you manage your objective of a 'yes or no'?

Hey everyone,

I'm so disappointed to be writing this, but we will no longer be able to prioritise integrating with UK bank accounts in the near future and thus will have to move this item status to Suggested.

When I first wrote this roadmap item it legitimately seemed like adding UK banks as a data source would be as easy and cost-effective as it was for the European Economic Area and North America - but we miscalculated and I can only apologise for being so naive.

We still want you to be able to get financial data into LicenceOne though, therefore this month we'll be investigating the viability of integrating with Xero accounting (and hopefully also Quickbooks Online) to detect apps, subscriptions and their costs in LicenceOne.

Additionally, although it's not automatic, we intend on allowing users to manually add app spend next week and build out the feature to allow users to import transactions in CSV format to have LicenceOne analyse them in the near future.

Again, I'm so sorry for disappointing you all and not being able to deliver on this.

Moving on, we'll make every effort to avoid moving roadmap items into "Planned" unless we're certain that they're viable.

To ensure that all of our UK users (and not only those of you that are on this roadmap item) are fully aware of this decision and to give them the opportunity to cancel their plan if this was a deal-breaker; we plan on shooting an additional email to accounts registered with their country set as United Kingdom tomorrow.

What went into this decision?

A few things.

1. It requires extra admin to set up a UK operation, which we are legally required to do to integrate with UK banks

While the extra bureaucracy in managing a second structure is workable, we had to question if managing that complexity was the best place to spend our time and energy at our current stage of company development.

What's more, if we were to move for RAISP certification as required, we would need to restructure the company so our "central management and control" were also in the UK (you can read more about this here

2. It would significantly increase our monthly fixed costs

We found other UK payment integrators with lower monthly minimums (£250/mo minimum from Truelayer was the best if you're interested), but when we added up all the other added costs from point 1 and point 3, it made this a financially risky move without the MRR in the UK to cover it.

3. Extra regulatory hoops to jump through

While we would likely be allowed to rent our payment integrators' AISP license, we'd still be required to complete the full accreditation process and become a fully-certified RAISP with the FCA in the UK within the next three years.

While we might indeed be willing to do so in three years, we're wary about putting a regulatory gun to our head without having enough market feedback and demand to justify the decision.

Will LicenceOne never integrate with banks in the UK?

We will be revisiting this item every 6 months (as we do with all of our "backlog" roadmap items) and remain open to getting this added one day.

We've also considered two crucial points that would have a huge impact on us reconsidering this:

• Be reasonably sure that we'll quickly gain around 40-50 subscription clients in the UK, making this integration roughly break-even
• Raise a reasonable seed round to finance the initial losses we'd make in developing a bank integration into the UK