Ixaris has announced the initial phase of its €4m Open Payments Ecosystem (OPE) project at the UK’s largest payments conference, PayExpo.
The two year project is financially backed by EU Horizon2020 under the Open Disruptive Innovation Scheme (ODI).
The OPE will enable any developer to write payment applications which will then be accessible to any bank for deployment to their customers. In effect, the OPE will enable banks to collaborate with the developer community in a truly open and safe way; only applications judged to be secure and compliant will be published on the Payments Application Store. As the OPE will be cloud-based, deployment of applications by banks will require minimal IT effort.
Alex Mifsud, CEO of Ixaris, said: “Unlike in other industries, Open APIs have yet to emerge as a key driver of innovation in the payment industry. There are many examples where the ‘open ecosystem’ approach has created a market for innovators, but – for some very good reasons relating to security and compliance risks – there is currently no established ecosystem for payments. We are launching the Ixaris OPE project at PayExpo to share with our peers how an open access approach to payments will create truly game-changing payment applications.”
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