Get Started: 6 Steps to Integrate Nordigen AIS API into your application

Follow these 6 steps and you'll get your integration with Nordigen Account Information API running in no time. 

The 6 steps to get started with Nordigen

1. Invite your team to join as users
2. Try with your account
3. Integrate API
4. Build a bank selection UI for your end users
5. Configure consent page UI
6. Contact Nordigen to verify your account

Take 10-20 minutes on each step per day to get set up in a few days, or be an overachiever and knock through all of them in 1-2 hours.

Step 1. Invite your team to join as users

By signing up, you've created a company account on the platform. If you're a one man company, feel free to skip skip this step, but in most cases, there will be multiple stakeholders involved in integrating Nordigen (product, UX/UI, data science and developer folks, for instance), so you need to invite everyone who will need access to the dashboard. 

To do that, please follow these steps.

1. Log into your account on Nordigen's Open Banking Platform
2. Visit Company section
3. Click "Invite Member", type in their Name and Email, and hit "Invite member"

A couple of things to note.

• As the person who setup the account, you automatically become an "admin", while all new users you invite will have "member" permissions. If you ever need to change permissions sets, please contact support@nordigen.com for assistance on this.
• Once you invite a new user, they will appear in users list with a "pending" tag, until they've verified their email and finished sign up. 
• If you have sent an invitation by mistake, you can revoke pending invites in the Company section.

Step 2. Try with your account

Next up, to get a feel for the end user journey, and the API output, we suggest you try connecting your own bank account in a simple interface that's available in the platform. 

To do this, please follow these steps.

1. Visit My Account Data section of the portal
2. Click "Connect New Bank"
3. Select the country
4. Select your bank from the list of banks provided
5. Give consent to Nordigen
6. Authenticate securely in your bank
7. Once redirected back to Nordigen portal, view/download data from your linked account(s)

Accounts connected via My Account Data are not linked to your company account and will not be visible to other users within your company. If you wish to unlink a connected account, simply click the three dots next to the account listed, and select "Delete Account".

Step 3. Integrate API

Now that you've finished setting up your account and tried the customer journey yourself, it's time to get started on the API. The simple 6-step instructions for how to connect your first account via API programmatically are neatly outlined in our Quickstart Guide. This step will require software development experience or at least basic skill of using Postman. Please note that you should get your API credentials from your account on the platform.

Step 4. Build a bank selection UI for your end users

Congrats on connecting the first account via API! 

Now it's time to build the bank selection UI - a front end interface where end users of your application will be able to select the banks they wish to connect. We have a detailed guide on how to build a bank selection UI in our API documentation, but below you'll find some of the highlights. 

Unlike many other providers, Nordigen doesn't impose a fixed iframe that you have to use, therefore giving you more control over how you want this step to look within your application. That being said, we do provide the equivalent of an iframe for companies that are short on time or have basic UI requirements.

You can choose between two options when it comes to bank selection UI.

1. Using Nordigen's pre-built open source JavaScript library that already incorporates general best practices for bank selection UI
2. Building a UI from scratch

The former will mean less work for your software development team and might be a great solution if you don't have very specific requirements for the UI. The latter will involve more development, but gives you full control over how you want to design the bank selection step.

Some considerations if you decide to build UI from scratch.

• Have a clear call to action e.g. "Select your bank".
• Include additional support text if necessary. It's twice more likely that the end user goes trough Open Banking journey if the value proposition is stated clearly.
• Show available banks. Considerations:
  • Show both the logo and the name of a bank;
  • Sort banks in alphabetical order or by popularity;
  • You can list all available banks in a given country or select only those ones that are used by your customer base;
  • If the bank list is not extensive, show banks in a grid form instead of listing all banks,
• Add a search bar for better UX.
• Use styles that fit with the rest of your application.

Step 5. Configure consent page UI

As part of their customer journey, your end users will be redirected to Nordigen to give consent for accessing their bank account information. To improve conversions on this step, we encourage clients to configure the styling of the consent step to match to your own branding more closely. Nordigen has built a simple interface that allows you to do this without coding. 

To configure the UI, do the following.

1. Visit UI configuration section in the open banking portal.
2. Play around with the colour scheme of different elements using either colour codes or simply finding a colour in the chart;
3. You will see all changes dynamically in the preview block. Once you're happy with the look, just press "Publish to production" and the configured colour scheme will be applied to consent step for all end users going through the journey. 

Step 6. Contact Nordigen to verify your account

For the final step, we require your company to be verified in order to make sure that you are who you say you are. Before a company is verified, all end users going through the customer journey will see a pink banner advising them to proceed only if they trust your company.

Once you are ready to go into production and wish to remove that informative message, please contact our team or your onboarding manager directly, and provide information on which account needs to be verified. Verification requests are usually processed within 1 business day, and in most cases the information you provided when signing up will be sufficient for us to do the verification while in some cases our team might ask for some clarification.

NB! There are no limitations to non verified accounts other than the aforementioned message to end users.