Unlocking Opportunities in Risk Management Through Open Banking with Roaring’s Pontus Holmberg
Businesses today face an ever-evolving set of challenges. From ensuring compliance with AML and KYC regulations to streamlining customer onboarding and monitoring risks in real-time, the demand for reliable, actionable data has never been greater. This is where Roaring comes in. Far from being a simple service provider, Roaring offers businesses the tools to shake up their workflows, enhance decision-making, and build smarter, more personalised customer experiences.
TL;DR
About Roaring: A Swedish company offering flexible data and risk-mitigating services through API, enabling businesses to customise their data integrations for various use cases.
Enable Banking's Role: The open banking partner delivers seamless connectivity that integrates with Roaring’s platform, enriching its data ecosystem.
Looking Ahead: Roaring is focused on advancing intelligence and insights, turning raw data into actionable value for clients across sectors.
To start tell us a bit about yourself, and Roaring.
Sure! I’m Pontus, Chief Product Officer, heading up product development & Innovation at Roaring and I have over 20 years of experience in the data and tech space.
Roaring was founded in 2016 and provides seamless access to company and personal data through plug-and-play services and developer-friendly integrations. We help clients mitigate business risks, fight financial crime, and streamline workflows. In the past two years, we’ve seen significant growth in client onboarding and revenue. Currently, we are hitting $5 million in revenue and are transitioning from a small company to a “small-big” company.
It's exciting to be on this journey and to be within this data information space because we can do a lot of good things with our data and technology. We empower fintechs, banks, and insurers with data solutions that simplify onboarding, automate workflows, and reduce manual tasks. Essentially, our API platform acts as an integration hub filled with data sourced from trusted authorities and third parties. Clients can customize their data needs—whether it’s financial information, company data, or beneficial ownership details. The magic happens because, with the API platform, they can cherry-pick the data sets and the information they need to build their solution on top of. You can think of it like a Lego set, allowing clients to pick the pieces they need to assemble the desired outcome.
Our clients include leading names such as SEB, Nordnet, and Fortnox. Companies that want to reduce manual processes by automating workflows. A typical use case would be replacing slow form-based onboarding with automated processes, reducing onboarding times from days to minutes.
Why did you decide to bring open banking into Roaring’s solutions?
Well, that’s a funny story. When I joined Roaring, Johan, our CEO, mentioned open banking and transactional data as things we should explore. At first, I didn’t quite get what he meant. In our space, transactional data is mostly used by banks for things like monitoring transactions for anti-money laundering (AML). So, I thought he was talking about PSD2 and open banking, but he was actually thinking more about transaction monitoring.
However, it became clear that open banking could enhance our offerings, especially for onboarding and risk mitigation. Transaction data is powerful! It can help clients assess risks like credit or business exposure. This understanding of open banking has laid the foundation for our partnership.
Why Enable Banking?
From the beginning, we prioritized being the “messenger” in the solution. Like you, we aim to operate behind the scenes as an invisible enabler. To achieve this, we needed a partner who could deliver both technical reliability and deep expertise. We found that with you.
Moreover, your extensive European bank coverage, spanning over 2,600 banks, was another critical factor. The breadth of this coverage, encompassing both business and individual accounts, has been vital. By working together, we’ve tapped into the full potential of Open Banking and delivered greater value to our clients.
Enable Banking’s platform has made open banking integration refreshingly straightforward. Your API framework integrates seamlessly with our existing infrastructure, ensuring consistency across the 65+ APIs we support. Moreover, your flexibility in enabling invisible connections to banks has been crucial. It allowed us to build our solution on top of your API, creating a uniform experience for our clients that aligns perfectly with how they interact with our other APIs. This seamless approach has been a cornerstone of our success.
How was the integration process with Enable Banking?
We built our solution on top of Enable Banking’s robust API, creating a streamlined and user-friendly interface for our clients. By interacting solely with our API, which communicates directly with Enable Banking’s system, we’ve eliminated the need for our clients to navigate additional documentation or worry about the underlying technology.
This approach ensures consistency across our solutions, aligning with the 65+ other APIs our clients already use in the same way. As a result, clients can access transaction data effortlessly through our solution without needing to engage directly with Enable Banking as a third-party provider.
Streamlining the integration has been a cornerstone of our successful collaboration. Your flexibility in enabling us to build this way opens up opportunities for future innovations. For example, we can further integrate your API into additional processes our clients use, combining individual and business risk data sets. So, our clients can verify revenue or transactions, such as identifying funds sent or received from abroad.
Ultimately, this smooth and unified process, powered by your platform, delivers significant value. By building our solution on your platform, we’ve made integration simple and consistent for our clients, enabling them to leverage the strengths of your service seamlessly alongside our APIs.
What has been the best part of collaborating with Enable Banking?
The best part about collaborating with Enable Banking has been the superior technology. Our CTO and team were impressed by the clarity and structure of your documentation, which is a rare achievement in the complex world of open banking. You really succeed at explaining how it works from a technical standpoint in your documentation, making integration smoother and more efficient.
Another highlight has been the support. Your team has been approachable and patient, encouraging us to ask even the simplest questions without hesitation. When necessary, we had access to your CTO, which was incredibly helpful.
I’ve also appreciated how closely your approach aligns with our own, particularly your focus on developer-friendly APIs. This shared commitment to making technology accessible and efficient resonates deeply with our mission at Roaring.
The combination of soft values, like collaboration and supportive engagement, and hard technical excellence has made this partnership work. For me, it means that I would give this partnership the highest possible grade.
How did your partnership with Enable Banking come about?
Our journey towards partnership with Enable Banking was deliberate and insightful. Initially, while collaborating with terminal and payment providers, we encountered limitations, particularly in Scandinavia's seemingly straightforward market, dominated by a handful of strong players. However, as we sought to deliver on our market promise, we realized these traditional avenues were insufficient, especially when expanding internationally, where dynamics drastically shifted.
Enter open banking—a paradigm shift catalyzed by EU legislation. This regulatory framework democratizes financial data access, liberating us from dependence on single entities like card companies or payment service providers. It offered us a pathway to leverage an open platform, mitigating risks of market dominance and fostering a more equitable landscape.
Our decision-making process involved rigorous evaluation, considering various factors and potential partners. Ultimately, we found Enable Banking to align perfectly with our vision. Opting for open banking over traditional card payment infrastructure felt not only right but strategic, empowering us to navigate the evolving financial ecosystem with confidence and resilience.
How has the introduction of open banking data into your products helped you to unlock new opportunities?
The introduction of open banking data has been transformative, opening the door to a wealth of new opportunities. While we’ve launched the first version of our product, we’ve only begun to explore its full potential. So far, we’ve scratched the surface of what’s possible to gain insights about accounts and account holders. As we move forward, integrating transaction data into accounts will unlock even deeper insights. We’re also actively working on ways to analyze this data further to deliver even greater value to our customers.
Our clients, spanning banks, insurance companies, and fintechs, form a strong foundation for us. Having open banking already integrated into our product has shifted conversations with them. What was once a “we’ll look into it in the future” discussion has become a real-time exploration of tangible solutions. With a robust product backed by more than 2,600 bank connections across Europe, we can provide meaningful, data-driven answers to their inquiries. That’s a significant achievement and something I emphasize in discussions and when I present on stage.
Having this in place has allowed us to confidently say “yes” to requests related to risk mitigation or transaction data analysis—concepts that were previously just ideas on paper. Now, with a working solution in place, we can engage in meaningful discussions and refine our offerings based on industry requirements.
Currently, our focus is on account verification, ensuring the account holder’s identity and verifying account balances. This is just the beginning, but it’s a solid foundation. It’s also sparked deeper conversations with clients eager to address specific challenges with our solution. Open banking data has turned potential into actionable opportunities, and we’re excited to keep building on this momentum.
Looking into the future, what’s on the horizon for Roaring?
Something cool that I would like to share is that after the first release, we added transaction data. So, the next step forward would be to start extracting and delivering insight into the transactional data.
Our general R&D efforts are focused on building an ecosystem to analyze data more effectively across all of our types of data, and that includes open banking data as well. Looking further ahead, the industry is poised to leverage technology to analyze data more effectively, turning combined datasets into actionable insights. For us, this means not just gathering data but providing the context and intelligence that transform it into real value.
In the future, we aim to categorize and analyze transaction data to be able to identify risks and provide metadata around transactions. For example, flagging suspicious activity could help clients make smarter decisions in onboarding and risk mitigation processes. This capability can be used in onboarding or other risk mitigation processes.
In five years, I see us evolving into an intelligence and insights company rather than just a data provider or API platform. Open banking will become a baseline. Our true value will lie in the insights we generate, enabling our clients to manage risk and optimize operations more effectively by combining more datasets, where we have analyzed and enriched the data to deliver actionable insights.
How can we learn more about Roaring?
If you’d like to learn more about Roaring, our collaboration, or their APIs, feel free to reach out directly to Roaring or connect with Pontus for more information.