ING’s multibanking start-up Cobase gets two new shareholders

Written by Ruby Hinchliffe
11th June 2020

ING has spun out Cobase, the multibanking start-up it bought a majority stake in back in 2018, as it lands a €10 million Series A from Nordea and Crédit Agricole CIB.

The fintech offers a multibank platform for banks’ businesses customers to access all their bank accounts in one place,

The two banks are now shareholders and commercial partners of Cobase, alongside primary shareholder ING.

The fintech also allows banks to embed Cobase’s technology into their own systems

The start-up, licenced by the Dutch central bank as a payment service provider, will use the new funding to expand its network of connected banks.

“Currently, our clients are large corporates, mainly from Western Europe,” says Cobase’s founder and CEO Jorge Schafraad. “Our strategy is to make Cobase a leading pan-European player in the coming years and then continue to roll out globally.”

Schafraad says that start-up is already connected to “more than a hundred banks” globally. “We simply follow the needs of our corporate clients.”

As well as offering the service through its own brand, the fintech also allows banks to embed Cobase’s technology into their own systems as a white-labelled solution.

The fintech completed ING Wholesale Bank’s accelerator programme back in 2016. Then in 2018, the Dutch start-up received a €7.5 million investment from ING Ventures.

“If you want to remain credible, you have to be open. Even if that means that you will sell services from the competitor,” ING’s CEO Ralph Hamers once said.

Cobase’s users can directly integrate their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into the fintech’s platform, thus no longer needing to integrate separately into each bank.

The start-up also offers businesses a central ‘Payment Hub’, as well as various cash and treasury management modules.

“Cobase has all the makings of a fintech success story,” says ING Venture’s chief innovation officer Benoît Legrand. “Their multi-bank platform is a great concept. Cobase is now entering its scale-up phase.”