Jul 11, 2019 
- The Arkéa banking group is pursuing its strategy of opening up to new players in financial services and reinforcing its leading role in the digital sector.
- Budget Insight, the French leader in data aggregation and payment initiation, will continue to be run by the current management team and will benefit from Arkéa’s support to speed up its development in France and prepare its deployment in Europe.
- This operation, which requires authorization from the banking regulator, will enable Arkéa to offer an enriched experience to its customers and take an additional step towards Open Banking.
Paris, 11 July 2019 – Arkéa has signed an agreement, subject to conditions, to acquire 80% of the capital of the fintech Budget Insight, a true tech jewel in the data aggregation and payment initiation sector. Clément Coeurdeuil and Romain Bignon, founders of Budget Insight will remain shareholders of the company as will the management team. With this stake, the Arkéa group will strengthen its position as a collaborative bank serving its partners and customers. Budget Insight’s expertise in data aggregation and enhancement will enable customers to be offered a simple and seamless experience by integrating financial and non-financial services into consumer uses.
Created in 2012, Budget Insight is a French fintech specialized in the aggregation of financial and non-financial data that has developed several APIs for BtoB players. Budget Insight provides a platform for building financial services based on data processing through its ability to collect data from more than 300 players (banks, insurance companies, major distributors, marketplaces, administrative services…). Budget Insight’s technologies are designed to enable the creation of simple, personalized and instant customer experiences.
By coming together with a solid banking group with extensive expertise, Budget Insight will benefit from strong synergies that will enable it to consolidate its technological edge. Budget Insight will also be able to prepare its deployment in Europe among its BtoB customers with the goal of becoming the leading player in Open Banking services.
The current management team will remain independent at the helm of the company to carry out all these projects and continue to develop its activities for its current and future BtoB customers.
With this acquisition, the Arkéa group consolidates its position as a reference partner for new financial services players. It is seeking to foster increased collaboration between traditional players and fintechs in order to improve and simplify uses throughout the customer journey. In this way, Arkéa intends to set up a genuine Open Banking platform.
This strategic acquisition, subject to authorization from the banking regulator, will also enable the Arkéa group to extend existing synergies with its online bank, Fortuneo, and personal assistant Max, to all its subsidiaries and distribution networks.
Ronan Le Moal, CEO of the Arkéa Group, said: “The acquisition of Budget Insight is another milestone in our opening strategy. We rely on our partner ecosystem to improve our service offering. Budget Insight’s expertise enables us to go further in simplifying and speeding up our members’ and customers’ daily lives, with seamless consumer journeys and ever more personalized services. Clément Coeurdeuil and Romain Bignon run a fine company that was not long in finding a profitable development model. Its BtoB positioning makes it a natural partner of the group which also develops white label banking services”.
Clément Coeurdeuil of Budget Insight added: “The coming together of Budget Insight and Arkéa makes great sense through a common strategy and shared values to which we are very strongly attached, such as the way we are obsessed with our customers and the well-being of our employees.”
Romain Bignon went on: “Arkéa will be a partner of choice in taking up the challenges of PSD2. We share Arkéa’s vision in terms of uses and it has already demonstrated the success of its opening strategy in the past.”
