Financial infrastructure, engineered by people who were there at the start.

Webovate was established in 2014 by Glyn Jackson, an engineer who had spent the previous fourteen years building payment gateways, digital-identity and financial platforms and cloud infrastructure: first as co-founder of a payments software company, then as lead architect for a digital agency's clients, including Samsung, HTC and the NHS.

When the Competition and Markets Authority's Order required the nine largest current-account providers to open customer data through a common API standard, Webovate built, in 2017 and within months of the standard's first release, one of the first Python connectors for the Read/Write APIs that existed at the time. Unknown to Webovate, that connector was already being used by the first team helping the Open Banking Implementation Entity get started, the body the banks had set up to deliver the standard. In December 2017, as the implementation programme restarted, the manager running that team invited Webovate to interview, and the company joined as a consultant: first in the support team, then quickly into the interim CTO's architecture team working on the Read/Write APIs. From 2018 to 2021 the company led the OBIE's conformance product for all nine mandated banks, from Barclays and HSBC to AIB and Bank of Ireland: workshops every two weeks in London, the tools that tested each implementation against the standard as it moved through the 3.1.x releases, and the reference applications and certification programme. Much of that tooling remains open source and in use today.

That experience ran in parallel with, and then led into, engineering for the companies building on the standard. Webovate was engaged by Ozone API to work with its engineers on the first model banks, and was later contracted by Ozone for a short full-time engagement, delivering the platform's first payment integrations, beginning with Stripe, and an international rollout. From 2021 the company became engineering partner and Open Banking specialist to AperiData, before it held any permissions: Webovate was engaged to build the entire platform from the first commit, through FCA authorisation as an account information service provider and on into a real-time credit bureau serving lenders across the United Kingdom, including the machine-learning categorisation engine at its heart. That work moved the company into the data the APIs produce: categorising transactions, modelling income and expenditure, and generating the affordability and risk signals lenders use to make decisions.

What began as a UK competition remedy became a template. The security profile the programme wrote went to the OpenID Foundation and became part of the Financial-grade API standard; the pattern it established, a directory, a common API standard and conformance testing, has since been adopted in one form or another from Brazil and Australia to the Gulf, and dozens of markets now run on it. The same ideas are being extended to Open Finance, to Smart Data across whole sectors of the economy, and to digital identity, where a person's consent and credentials travel with them. And a newer force is changing what can be done with the data once it moves: machine learning and AI can now read a financial life well enough to make the decisions taken about it fairer, faster and better informed.

Webovate did not build that movement, but it has worked inside it from the early days of the UK programme to production machine learning on consented data, in the UK, the Middle East and beyond. The company's focus now is where the movement is going: applying machine learning and AI to consented financial data to understand people and businesses properly, and helping the organisations that hold that data use it well. That is where we think the most useful engineering of the next decade will happen, and it is what we intend to keep pushing forward.