Ixaris Adds Competition To B2B Payments Innovation

Last year, payments technology company Ixaris announced it would spin off some of its operations to form a separate unit dedicated to B2B payments. Now, the company is exploring the B2B payments space even further.

The company launched its OPC Live! Innovation Challenge this week at the Innovative Finance Global Summit, held in London, Ixaris said Tuesday (April 11). The firm is offering a prize fund of about $21,000 to developers and FinTech companies that develop an innovative, disruptive and progressive B2B payments solution.

The challenge is part of the Open Payment Ecosystem initiative, promoted by the EU, and will enable developers to use the OPC (Open Payments Cloud) cloud-based toolkit, which offers a platform on which innovators can access APIs and sandboxes in a single place. The winner will be announced in June, Ixaris said, at the FinDEVR conference.

“Commercial payments account for $290 billion of revenue globally, and disruption in this market is well overdue,” said Alex Mifsud, CEO of Ixaris, in a statement. “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.”

The first time Ixaris opened its OPC framework, last weekend at a hackathon event, developers created a virtual payments solution, an FX-optimized virtual card tool and an SME working capital solution. These creations will be competing for the prize at the OPC Live! Innovation Challenge.

“We have seen some exciting applications developed at the hackathon and are looking forward to more ground-breaking innovations from across the world,” Mifsud added. “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.”