Bud has become one of the first fintech firms to obtain permission from the UK's Financial Conduct Authority to aggregate accounts with an AISP (Account Information Service Provider) licence and initiate payments with a PISP (Payment Initiation Service Provider) licence.

These new licences are issued under new FCA regulations brought about by open banking and the European Union's second Payment Services Directive (PSD2). The aggregation licences give Bud and its banking partners API access to customer data from the nine largest banks in the UK, at the request of users. The payment licence dictates that, if a customer so chooses, Bud can initiate a bank-to-bank transfer, allowing him to spend money in new ways and move money around his accounts on the Bud platform.

The focus at Bud is, according to its propaganda, to bring the whole financial services market under one roof, offering customers ways to interact with any financial product. To this end Bud is distributing its platform into financial institutions such as banks. It believes that this might change the experience that HNW customers will have with the banking apps that they are already using.

Bud’s regulatory experience seems to have been fairly unique up until this point. It has participated in two regulatory sandbox cohorts, it has become one of the first dual open banking licence holders and it already has other regulatory 'permissions,' which pertain to the facilitation of introductions for credit, investment, mortgages and non-investment insurance products.

Bud has recently formed a partnership with First Direct on another regulatory subject - ring-fencing, the process whereby systemically important banks in the UK are obliged to separate their retail operations from any wholesale and investment divisions. First Direct recently told the London Times that it wanted to be "at the forefront of the changes as banks attempt to demonstrate they can be trusted not to simply promote their own products, but to actively help consumers in search of the best possible deals from any company."

First Direct intends to start providing open banking services through Bud shortly. Facebook, meanwhile, is thinking of becoming its own payments processor as a PISP and connecting to bank accounts directly through application programming interfaces or APIs. It may then ask consumers for permission to use their bank details as a payment method. It is also toying with the idea of becoming an AISP. In the words of Christoffer Hernaes of Skandiabanken, Norway's first pure Internet bank: "The directive enables AISPs to present an aggregated view from more than one bank account. AISPs can analyse spending behavior or aggregate into one overview a user’s account information from several banks, rendering obsolete traditional mobile and online banking solutions based on one account."

The FCA recently opened its so-called authorisation hub to facilitate further fintech start-ups. For more on the British authorisation process, click here.