PR: SmartBill integrates Smart Accounts, the first automated Open Banking service authorized by the National Bank of Romania
Bucharest, 15.03.2023
SmartBill, the leader of the invoicing and inventory management software market, with over 85,000 users, announces the integration of the Smart Accounts service through a partnership with the Romanian start-up Smart Fintech. Smart Accounts is the first local Open Banking service authorized by the National Bank of Romania. It enables automatic interrogation of bank accounts, allowing users or accounting companies to instantly connect with their or their customers' bank data, respectively.
Smart Accounts integration enables the automation of the entire process of interrogation and aggregation of data from multiple bank accounts, thus eliminating the need to manually and repetitively operate data across various applications. Consequently, the accuracy of financial accounting activity for SmartBill users can increase significantly.
"Using the SmartBill ecosystem, Romanian SMEs and accounting firms have been increasing the efficiency of their activity for over 16 years. With the Smart Accounts integration, they will also save more time and will eliminate errors that may occur during manual bank data operations. An example would be reconciling an invoice with a bank collection. This partnership enables the 85,000 businesses of our network to connect SmartBill accounts to their bank accounts, providing an unfragmented and seamless experience within the program. At the same time, Smart Accounts optimizes the processes for accounting firms, thus allowing them to make better use of the time invested in the operational process and develop their client portfolio", said Radu Hasan, CEO and co-founder of SmartBill.
Enhanced security methods are in place to protect details such as transaction history, available funds, and any other data in the SmartBill platform, the information being transparent only to the bank and SmartBill. Whereas Smart Accounts users can only interrogate the accounts' data with their explicit consent as account holders, access is used exclusively for reading bank data, and these accounts remain entirely secure.
"Interacting with bank data through Open Banking, such as integrating Smart Accounts in the SmartBill platform, is becoming a natural modus operandi nowadays and contributes to the efficient use of our financial information and time. With a single consent given to their banks, Smart Accounts users receive their real-time and zero-effort bank transactions directly into SmartBill, where they view invoice collections alongside other transactions. Thus, the relationship with the banks and the providers of accounting services becomes much more efficient, faster, and error-free, the data not being exposed unsecured outside the banking applications", said Alice Anghelea, Revenue Growth, Smart Fintech.
With each account interrogation request from Smart Accounts to the user’s banks, the latter ensures the validity of the user’s consent. Then they verify the identity of the sender (Smart Fintech), validating it is a third-party provider authorized by the NBR. By following this process only, the banks return the data requested by Smart Accounts. These check-ups are instant and mandatory to ensure the security of users’ data.
As a result, Smart Accounts and the Open Banking technology eliminate recurring activities that couldn't have been automated by now, even by RPA solutions, as the interaction with bank applications and banking data is highly sensitive and must occur under maximum security conditions and NBR supervision.
SmartBill’s integration with Smart Accounts is a new step in Smart Fintech's plans for the future. They will continue and launch further automation soon, to optimize and improve user processes. SmartBill also aims to integrate Smart Fintech’s payment initiation solution, SmartPay, for its users and customers as the partnership evolves.
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About Smart Fintech
Smart Fintech is a Romanian start-up, authorized by the NBR, set to deliver innovative open-banking solutions that emerge from two words: Finance and Technology. It is a self-sustained start-up, founded in 2019 by Mihaela Georgescu, Ana Maria Georgescu, Alexandru Cociu, and Andrei Dumitru, in the context of the liberalization of access to financial banking information (open banking) according to the PSD2 European directive. With a joint track record of over 20 years in IT projects, its co-founders are enthusiastic about open banking and its innovation potential in providing cheaper and safer modern digital services. Thus, Smart Fintech developed SmartPay and Smart Accounts, the first services authorized in Romania for payment initiation and account information based on open banking concepts. The two services are available to integrate for any business that aims to accelerate cash flows, simplify and automate payments and reconciliations, or the processing of financial information in general while optimizing the costs generated by these activities. These services are already integrated and functional for several companies in various fields of activity (e-commerce, payments, ERP, invoicing, financial services) that are redefining, as we speak, their users' experience and financial intelligence.
About SmartBill
Developed in 2007 by entrepreneurs Radu Hasan, Ioana Hasan, and Mircea Căpățînă, SmartBill is currently the most used and appreciated management and invoicing program on the Romanian market, with over 85,000 customers in the ecosystem. SmartBill addresses many businesses, from PFAs, small and medium-sized companies, and even multinationals, from all business fields. Through SmartBill, are issued monthly over 4,000,000 invoices, and over 14 billion euros are invoiced annually. In 2016, SmartBill benefited from 1 million euros from the investment funds Catalyst Romania and Gecad Ventures, which took over 30% of the social shares through a capital increase operation. In 2020, the Norwegian group Visma took over half of the company, but the founders retained control. In 2022, SmartBill integrated with the national electronic invoicing system e-Factura, thus allowing users to send e-Invoices directly to the SPV with a simple click. During 2023, SmartBill will integrate the e-Transport and SAF-T systems.
