Cheddar expands into Open Banking with its acquisition of Upside Saving

By Joy Dumasia

Cheddar, the bank transfer platform powering payments, announces an exciting new acquisition of open banking technology by Upside Saving to be added to the company’s free payment offering.

Upside, the business acquired by Cheddar developed an open banking-enabled, hyper-targeted marketing platform which connects retail brands with consumers by offering personalised cashback, a unique approach providing significant advantages over traditional cashback platforms. 

Having identified synergies between Upside’s technology and its platform, Cheddar will use the technology to complete the picture of the payments process for consumers. The open banking integration, which can be run without 3rd parties via Cheddar, will further develop the Cheddar payment platform to provide even greater value for customers.

Cheddar operates as a bank account-enabled payments platform accessible for consumers to use. The platform is built to solve inefficiencies in the payment chain, innovate the way people send and manage money and make payments more accessible for small businesses and consumers. Work to incorporate open banking into Cheddar’s services is already underway. The first services of this kind are anticipated to be available to the platform’s customers later in 2022.

Tariq Zaid, CEO and Founder at Cheddar, added: “We are delighted to have acquired Upside’s innovative technology and to begin implementing open banking as part of Cheddar’s services. We believe this will add substantial value for our customers whilst also complementing our other services and operations. We look forward to exploring these new open banking opportunities to enhance our customer offering. Consumer desires are at the heart of what Cheddar hopes to achieve, and because of this, we always want to stay at the forefront of innovation to ensure we’re offering our customers the very best in digital finance services.”