Customer Story

Solutions at-a-Glance

PingFederate & PingDirectory are hosted by Simieo.

Ping offers seamless integration and the ability to support a dynamic, secure customer experience at scale.

Flinks now has the ability to deploy the foundational components to be agile in the ever-evolving Open Banking ecosystem.

Flinks also has the ability to offer competitive differentiation to further position themselves in a competitive market.

Flinks Delivers a True Open Banking Experience, Democratizing the Financial Landscape of Canada

The Objective

Back when it launched in 2017, Flinks was Canada’s only dedicated financial data connectivity provider. Since then, the company has established itself as the country’s leading open banking provider, powering hundreds of fintechs, and has expanded to the US market. Their open banking API and no-code platform enables businesses in various industries—lending, payments, wealth management, fintech, and digital banking—to gain access to their customers’ financial data in an instant while also ensuring that those customers can control how they share that data.

Because Flinks was introducing a new kind of technology in a highly regulated and notoriously risk-averse sector, achieving this level of impact was no easy feat. To offer a financial data connectivity solution that financial businesses and consumers would trust, Flinks’s team knew they needed to build with safety and compliance in mind.

The Challenge

In order to drive innovation, Flinks focused on the core virtue of open banking: customer consent and compliance. Therefore, they needed a way to effectively obtain and enforce customers’ consent for their data to be shared and, simultaneously, to secure that data as it was being shared.

Flinks was attempting to solve a critical problem of data ownership: providing clarity over what data is being shared, to whom, and when. To do so, Flinks would need to solve how they could effectively share, handle, and delete this data if needed. And though an official open banking framework was still to come, Flinks wanted to be able to adapt quickly to regulatory changes.

This meant that Flinks needed to be 100% confident that users connecting their financial accounts would be presented with the ability to provide their consent and a clear process to share specific elements of data. This consent needed to be stored and shared at scale across both financial institutions and fintechs. in real time.

The Solution

Ping’s out-of-the-box flows proved to be a good fit for Flinks. Moreover, Ping introduced Simieo as a trusted partner to help achieve Flinks’ goals in time. With Simieo's deep understanding of the unique challenges Flinks was facing and their ability to host this environment in Canada, they were the perfect choice to meet the strict deadlines Flinks set for itself.

Based on Flinks’ needs, Ping recommended PingFederate and PingDirectory as the best solutions to handle the task and make sure financial data would remain secure at all times. Ping helped to bring security and trust to Flinks by handling their identities’ security and consumer consent management within a secure platform environment that would allow for data sharing and collaboration across an entire ecosystem.

Simeio was able to do the implementation and software hosting of Ping’s solutions in time to meet Flinks’ deadline.

Flinks trusts Ping to handle critical functions of its core data connectivity solution.

Adam Gibson

General Manager, Open Banking Products, Flinks

The Results

The timelines were ambitious and the challenges were complex, but we had the right teams in place across the board. With dedicated collaboration across the Flinks, Simeio, and Ping teams, this combined effort was a massive success.

Thanks to Ping’s and Simeio’s support, Flinks’ solution is secure and scalable, as we allow hundreds of third-party apps to connect millions of users’ financial accounts easily and safely. Ping runs seamlessly behind the scenes; Flinks takes care of allowing the authentication and access on the front end, while Ping works on the back-end–something Ping values.

Now, Flinks is up and running with a true open banking experience for financial businesses and their customers. By helping them clear complex obstacles around security and consent management, Ping helped Flinks’ team achieve their goals.

More About Flinks

Based in Montreal, Canada, Flinks is a leading North American open banking platform. Trusted by millions of individuals accessing financial services at world-class companies, Flinks enables businesses to connect to their customers' financial accounts, enrich this data, and utilize it to deliver better digital products.

About Simeio

Simeio is an award-winning global managed identity services provider of Identity and Access Management (IAM), interoperable with the security industry's leading IAM tools. With 700+ employees worldwide, Simeio secures over 160 million identities globally for large enterprises and government entities. Managed identity services from Simeio include key IAM domains: Privileged Access Management, Customer Identity & Access Management, Access Management & Federation, and Identity Governance & Administration. To better manage multiple IAM tools and platforms, Simeio offers its Identity Orchestrator platform to support ease of integration, seamless management, and a single-layer view of an IAM program. The company is recognized for its business and technical leadership and is highly rated by Gartner, Forrester, and KuppingerCole. It is also ranked by Great Places to Work®.