The Polish Financial Supervision Authority announced yesterday that it has granted an authorisation to operate as a national payment institution to Volt Technologies, based in Kraków. The authorisation covers, among other things, the execution of payment transactions such as transfers and remittances, the issuing of payment tools and the offering of so-called open banking services, i.e. AIS (access to information about bank accounts) and PIS (initiation of transactions from customers' bank accounts).

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Volt Technologies, based in Krakow, Poland, is a subsidiary of the London-based British fintech of the same name. From its website, one can learn that it specialises primarily in offering companies tools for accepting cashless payments, using the idea of open banking. It seems to me that it is closest to the Lithuanian fintech kevin, which is also present in our market.

The idea of open banking is that the customer is the owner of the data stored in the account and linked to the bank account. The bank is therefore obliged to grant access to this data, if the customer so wishes, to third parties such as fintechs. This is how the PIS service came about. It consists of the payment operator making transfers from the user's account, with their consent. Nowadays in Poland, traditional pay by links are commonly replaced by transfers using open banking.

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Volt Technologies, is only the second company to receive a KIP licence from the KNF this year. The first was Meest Transfer, a company offering international transfers, including from Poland to Ukraine. Interestingly, entities have recently been struck off the register of domestic payment institutions almost as frequently. Data on the KNF website shows that since the beginning of 2022, a KIP licence has been granted to four entities (including Volt Technologies) and three companies have been struck off the list of KIPs.