Wave, a Toronto based company providing financial services and software for small businesses, is all set to limit its free online accounting software and app to North America in view of open banking legislation in the European Union and the United Kingdom. Open banking also called open bank data, allows personal consumer financial data to be accessed by the third-party through application programming interfaces (APIs). The API’s put a lot of pressure into the information technology infrastructure of the financial service providers, especially on the accounting side.
“Over the past two years, the Wave team has worked hard to develop powerful new features that our small business owners need. As Wave’s functionality has grown, the resources required to support it have increased. In addition, new local legislation, such as Open Banking in the EU and UK, make it infeasible for Wave to offer full services in these markets and has required Wave to limit functionality for those customers,” wrote Kirk Simpson, the co-founder and CEO of Wave in an email to the users outside North America.
Wave is completely free with no artificial limits on invoicing, contacts, items, or other features. The company charges a fee for adding payroll, payment processing, or professional bookkeeping.
“Beginning December 2020, Wave will devote our product development resources solely to the United States and Canada. As of November 30, 2020, new Wave account sign-ups are limited to US and Canadian business owners only. Businesses located in other countries will not be able to sign up for a Wave account after November 30,” writes Kirk Simpson.
Even though Wave is still available to the existing customers in the US and Canada, the company may decide to limit that too in the future, states the email.
For the Wave accounting users in India, the company has tied up with the Indian cloud-based accounting service provider Zoho for a special deal and compatibility to transfer the accounts.
The Wave began operation in 2010 with 8 employees and today has a workforce of about 250. In 2019, Wave was acquired by H&R Block, a New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listed company operating nearly 12,000 retail tax offices in the US, Canada and Australia.