Mobile banking

Bank to re-enter UK market




Dutch bank ING has announced it will be re-entering the UK retail banking market via a free mobile app.

Yolt will allow users to manage their money with different banks for different financial services all in one place.

ING has only held a wholesale banking operation in the UK since the sale of ING Direct to Barclays in 2012.

Yolt integrates the users’ bank accounts in one mobile dashboard and lets them know how many days are left until pay day, while predicting their bank balance based on their direct debits.

“We built the aggregator in the way that people think about money; how long is it before their pay date; how much are they spending and what is the risk of them going overdrawn?,” said Ignacio Vilar, chief innovation officer at ING.

The official launch is expected to be next year, but Yolt is now ready for the early adopters and will become available on iOS and Android in the coming months.

“We believe we have to reinvent the way we are providing customer service; this is where becoming a platform and ‘the place to go’ is core to our strategy,” Ignacio added.

The launch comes before new EU regulations known as PSD2 come into force in 2018, which will force banks to open up bank account data to external parties. 

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