OPC Live! Innovation Challenge launches today at the Innovate Finance Global Summit in London in a bid to encourage developers and financial technology companies across the world to help transform business-to-business payments, an industry that generates $290 billion in revenues but lags retail payments in transaction automation by several years.
With a prize fund of €20,000, the challenge is launched by Ixaris Technologies as part of the EU sponsored Open Payment Ecosystem initiative to drive competition and stimulate creation of better, cheaper and easier ways for businesses to pay and get paid. The competition will run until June 10th. The winner will be announced at FinDEVR, a financial API conference established in Silicon Valley with its European debut being held in Europe this year.
Open Payments Cloud is a secure and compliant cloud-based architecture that incorporates a toolkit of diverse payments APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and sandboxes into a single platform, enabling anyone to create payment-enabled applications and even publish new APIs and sandboxes.
“Commercial payments account for $290 billion dollars of revenue globally and disruption in this market is well overdue,” explains Alex Mifsud, CEO of Ixaris. “In OPC Ixaris has developed a truly open, free and secure environment that makes it easy to develop, deploy and run payment applications which provides a practical means for all parties to collaborate in line with the new regulatory measures coming into force next year.”
Ixaris for the first time opened its Open Payments Cloud (OPC) technology framework at a hackathon over the weekend of 7 to 9 April. The winners – including a virtual payment solution to bring transparency to community projects, a solution for delivering forex-optimized virtual cards via Android Pay or Apple Pay, and a solution to optimize working capital for SMEs - can now take their ideas forward to compete in the OPC Live! Innovation Challenge, a competition open to entrants worldwide.
“We have seen some exciting applications developed at the hackathon and are looking forward to more ground-breaking innovations from across the world,” says Mr Mifsud. “There is a huge appetite for solving the challenges of complexity, compliance and security in B2B payment. OPC provides a practical environment for anyone to have a go at coming up with killer applications and solutions that can contribute to efficiencies and substantial savings for small and large businesses alike.”