# tell.money: High-Level Overview
tell.money is a market-leading open banking SaaS platform that enables banks, fintechs, and payment providers to comply with regulatory obligations while deploying open banking APIs and consumer-facing tools[1][2]. The company serves as critical infrastructure for the open banking ecosystem, providing account providers (ASPSPs) with the technical and compliance solutions needed to participate in regulated financial markets.
The company solves a fundamental problem in modern finance: the complexity of building and maintaining compliant open banking infrastructure. Rather than forcing financial institutions to build these capabilities from scratch, tell.money offers a unified platform that handles API management, regulatory compliance, and monitoring—reducing time-to-market and operational burden[1][4]. This positions tell.money as an enabler of financial innovation, allowing its customers to focus on customer experience rather than infrastructure challenges.
# Origin Story
tell.money was founded by David Monty and Tony Poole, two entrepreneurs with over 20 years of combined experience building and operating fintechs[3]. The company was originally incorporated as Affinity Money Limited on October 18, 2012, before rebranding to tell.money in October 2024[5]. This long operational history suggests the founders refined their understanding of financial services infrastructure over more than a decade before positioning the company as a dedicated open banking platform.
The founders' deep expertise in regulated financial markets—spanning banking, payment processing, e-money issuance, acquiring, and compliance—directly informed tell.money's product strategy[3]. Having built global banking and payment processing platforms themselves, Monty and Poole understood the specific pain points that account providers face when entering the open banking ecosystem, giving the company a clear product-market fit from inception.
# Core Differentiators
# Role in the Broader Tech Landscape
tell.money operates at the intersection of two powerful trends: regulatory digitalization and open banking mandates. Across the UK and EU, regulators have mandated that banks expose customer data and payment capabilities through standardized APIs—a shift that creates both compliance burden and innovation opportunity[6].
The timing is critical: as open banking regulations mature and enforcement tightens, financial institutions face mounting pressure to demonstrate technical conformance and security. tell.money's monitoring and testing capabilities address this directly, making the company essential infrastructure rather than optional tooling. The company also benefits from the broader fintech ecosystem's growth—as more payment providers and challenger banks enter the market, demand for compliant API infrastructure increases.
By serving both traditional banks and emerging fintechs, tell.money influences the ecosystem's architecture. It lowers barriers to entry for new financial services providers, accelerating competition and innovation while ensuring regulatory standards are maintained. This positions the company as a critical node in the financial services infrastructure layer.
# Quick Take & Future Outlook
tell.money is well-positioned to capture sustained growth as open banking regulations expand globally and deepen in existing markets. The company's comprehensive platform and founder expertise create defensible competitive advantages, particularly as compliance requirements become more complex and enforcement more rigorous.
The next phase of tell.money's evolution will likely involve geographic expansion beyond the UK, as similar open banking mandates roll out across Europe and other regions. Additionally, as the open banking ecosystem matures, the company may expand beyond compliance tooling into higher-value services—such as advanced analytics, fraud detection, or consumer-facing innovation platforms—that leverage its position as a trusted infrastructure provider.
The broader trend working in tell.money's favor is the financialization of software: financial services are increasingly delivered through APIs and platforms rather than monolithic institutions. tell.money sits at the center of this shift, making it a foundational player in the next generation of financial services architecture.
