Fintech

Last month we joined our technology partner Fiserv on the virtual main stage at API World to discuss how financial data aggregation works, its benefits and real world use cases. Here’s a summary of what we shared with a focus on payments:

Why It Matters – Consumers Want Enhanced Experiences

• Over 50% of consumers agree a personalized financial dashboard will save them time, be time well spent and make them feel confident in achieving their financial goals.

• More than 1 in 4 consumers want you to recognize patterns over time and provide relevant recommendations based on those patterns.

• 26% of consumers value sophisticated suspicious activity monitoring possible through an aggregated dashboard of their finances.

• 66% of consumers are interested in aggregated statements to track spending across multiple accounts.

What Is Financial Data Aggregation

Financial data aggregation enables financial technology companies to empower their users to give permission based access to data related to checking accounts, savings accounts, investment accounts, credit card accounts and more to provide optimized finacial products and solutions.

How Does Financial Data Aggregation Work

Aggregation is the process and methods by which data from multiple sources are collected, standardized and made available through a common interface. Here’s how the process works:

Aggregation in Action – Faster Payments 

Challenge

VoPay wanted to enhance existing EFT / ACH payments by verifing:

• Contact information for KYC and fraud prevention purposes

• Funds before initiating EFT/ACH transfers 

• That a transaction occurred

Solution

VoPay’s Intelligent EFT / ACH (iQ11) payment service offers:

• North American wide bank and credit union coverage

• Quick and reliable data access for optimal user experience 

• Full white labeling capabilities for a flexible design

• Consistent data security and integrity

You can learn more about VoPay’s open banking payments solution here.

Fintech adoption has nearly tripled in Canada, increasing from just 18% in 2017 to 50% in 2019. Canadian digital-only banks will experience an increase in account holders between 2020 and 2024 at an annual growth rate of 8.9%. For the same time period the annual US growth rate will be 19.8% and 12.7% in the UK. Canada’s big five banks are still dominating the market along with the fact that there is a very small underbanked population for digital-only banks to target. Here’s a closer look at the current state of fintech adoption:

VoPay can empower business banking clients to offer their own customers a better debit and credit experience by allowing seamlessly integration with business banking services and optimizing payment operations with just one API. You can learn more here about our solutions.

The Payments as a Service (PaaS) model eliminates the need for costly and lengthy implementations. Instead, it shifts to a subscription-based technology designed to reduce upfront IT spend, enhances client flexibility and gives access to the latest technologies. PaaS is designed to allow merchants and others to leverage local, regional and global payments options through a single interface. The complexity of moving funds between providers is handled by the PaaS layer and is hidden from the user. Here’s a look at the layers that make up VoPay’s PaaS solution:

The solution is designed to allow businesses to utilize mulitple payment options through a single open API  to meet their specific payment needs. Because only one API is required, you’re only required to maintain one relationship.

Through VoPay’s API layer you can access the following payment services:

Intelligent EFT / ACH (iQ11): Accept instant bank account verification payments, improve payment speed and reduce NSFs. Learn more here.

EFT / ACH: Seamlessly facilitate bank payment processing by connecting to North America’s banking system. Learn more here.

Interac e-Transfer for Business: Send thousands of near real-time payments with higher funding limits with just an email. Learn more here.

VoPay Instant (Visa Direct): Send money directly to almost any Visa card holder in real-time. Learn more here.

You can access our Visa Direct service (AKA VoPay Istant) through our developer-friendly API or payment portal to send real-time payouts to almost any Visa Debit cardholder in Canada 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Last quarter global Visa Debit spend was up 20% to $1.2 trillion while credit was down 9%, to $1.1 trillion. 

There are several use cases for the payment service including:

Earned Wage Access: Employers can send real-time payouts of earned wages to workers’ eligible debit cards 

Lending: Lenders can offer a real-time loan funding option and exceed customer expectations when they need money quickly

Insurance: Optimize the insurance claim payout process and maximize customer satisfaction 

Gig Economy: Companies can give gig workers the option to receive speedy payouts for their work 24/7/365

Product Features 

Speed: With Visa Direct, funds can be available in a recipient’s account within 30 minutes of transaction approval—all day, every day.

Convenience: Seamless payments to the card your customers already carry in their wallets.

Security: All Visa Direct transactions are processed via VisaNet, protected by Visa’s multi-layered security.

Fully Customizable: Visa Direct can be fully integrated through the VoPay API for a seamless end user experience to fit your brand needs so you stay top of mind.

Cost Effective: Visa Direct is a low cost alternative for cheques, ACH, and EFT, with half the administrative work and paid in real time. You not only save on payment method cost, but also on resource and management time so your team can focus on what really matters.

How It Works?

Businesses only require the recipient’s Visa Debit card number to send money (no financial  information of the recipient is required for payment). Recipients automatically receive funds in their Visa Debit account within 30 minutes with no action is required on their part.

Key Benefits

Easy Signup Process: No recipient banking information required.

Real-Time Funding: Deposit funds within 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Quick Reconciliation: Real-time acknowledgement and daily status reports.

Market Presence: Leverage Visa’s large cardholder network,

Other Payment Tools: Access to end-to-end EFT payment solutions including bulk e-transfer.

Seamless Integration: Access the service through VoPay’s developer friendly API.

Get In Touch

Schedule a chat with one our product specialist to learn more!

In the summer we released our first quarterly ‘Open Banking Movers and Shakers‘. We’re pleased to share an updated list with several new additions. Welcome Wealthsimple, Borrowell, Financial Data Exchange, Payments Canada and Marble! All the organizations below have helped make 2020 the biggest year yet for open banking (AKA open finance or consumer-directed finance). Current projected open banking growth through 2026 is over 24%, reaching $43.1 billion in value.

We’ve listed everyone below that’s included in the graphic above for your browsing convenience. Want to be included in next year’s ‘Open Banking Movers & Shakers’ list? Send us an email at: press@vopay.com

Data Networks

•  Envestnet Yodlee

• Flinks 

• Fiserv

• Plaid

• MX

• Inverite

• Direct ID

• M Science

KYC/AML

• Equifax

• Experian

• Transunion

• Trulioo

Lending

• Quicken Loans

• Kabbage

• Marble

Spending / Savings

• Mogo

• EQ Bank

• Petal

• Borrowell (NEW ADDITION)

Payment-As-A-Service

• Interac

• VoPay

• Trustly

Investing

• Betterment

• Morningstar

• Wealthica 

• Quest Trade

• Wealthsimple (NEW ADDITION)

Accounting

• Xero

• Intuit

Policy / Data Standards

• FDATA North America

• Fintech Growth Syndicate

• Canadian Lenders Association

• Financial Data Exchange (NEW ADDITION)

• Payments Canada (NEW ADDITION)

This month Payments Canada released survey results from Canadian small business owners show that 1 in 4 Canadian businesses struggles with cashflow and that the top 2021 priority for 2 in 5 small businesses will be to improve overall efficiency to simplify and enhance everyday payment interactions. Some other pain points and trends from the survey include:

VoPay eliminates all these payment pain points through its single API or payment portal:

• Improved cashflow through faster funding times and reduced NSFs

• Reduced fraud through verified users and bank accounts

• Increased efficiencies through paperless payments requiring no banking information and real-time reporting

Learn more here.

In today’s New Normal both advanced technology and legacy businesses are looking to faster-integrated payment methods to enable them to offer a seamless experience to their customers. Payment technologies need to provide a flexible, real-time, and transparent experience that can operate at scale.  In the new economic environment, payments need to transcend physical and manual interactions to become easily embedded into a simple payment technology layer between the bank, the service provider, and the business. With that in mind, we wanted to look at small to mid-size business fintech adoption including payments. The numbers below are from 2019 so you can expect an even high adoption rate in all sectors this year.

Our payments as a service offer multiple payment solutions through our single API including Visa Direct (coming soon) which enables real-time payout experiences with the scale and security of the Visa network. With a direct connection to the end-users bank account, Visa Direct is an ideal solution for paying gig-economy workers exactly on their terms when they do the work, and offers online marketplaces the ability to improve their selling experience with real-time payments. Learn more here about VoPay’s payment service offering.

Welcome to our ONE:ONE blog series where we sit down with thought leaders and pioneers in the fintech, payments and open banking space.

We set down with Jonah Chininga, Co-Founder and Business Development Officer at MICC Financial, Canada’s first digital rotational savings platform that helps groups of people save money, access capital, and build credit. 

Q&A

1. What’s one thing everyone should know about MICC Financial?

MICC is a platform for people and communities to work together to achieve their financial goals.

2. What’s your role at MICC Financial?

I focus on business development and managing the overall operations and resources of the company.

3. What gets you most excited about the VoPay MICC partnership?

Working with VoPay has allowed us to provide frictionless payment options to our users. MICC vision is to expand beyond Canada and VoPay provides us with instant access to a global network of local banking payment infrastructure.

4. What does the future of financial services look like?

In the near future, I envision a sharing economy embedded in every part of the financial system. This will be driven by customer intelligence and peer-to-peer transactions, enabled by partnerships between traditional banking institutions and FinTech companies.

5. Who is your fintech/ tech hero and why?

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square & Cash App. He has built an ecosystem that redefines the world’s relationship with money by making it universally accessible. I’m impressed with how Cash app has become the fastest growing financial brand in the world. 

Learn more here about the VoPay + MICC Financial client announcement.

In recent years open banking has become associated with the digitization and transformation of the financial services sector. New regulations have been one of the major drivers, starting in Europe before quickly spreading around the world.

Open Banking has the potential to accelerate the quality, competition, and distribution of financial services for both individuals and business. On the heels of milestone acquisitions by Mastercard and Visa of Finicity and Plaid respectively, fintechs are hurrying to build financial data rails across African FIs and beyond.

Which regulatory frameworks are enjoying the most success? What are the unique challenges in establishing financial data connectivity on the continent? Who will be the next Plaid of Africa? Find out by registering for the CLA’s Global Open Banking panel on October 15, 2020.

Below is a look at the current state of open banking around the world:

Also, next month our Founder & CEO Hamed Arbabi will be joining Microsoft and Payments Canada to discuss the current state of open banking in Canada and what the future holds. Register now for the panel discussion and learn more about our open banking payments solution which allows you to accept instant bank account verified payments, improve funding speed and reduce NSFs with sufficient account balance visibility.

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Our friends at Plaid recently published “The Fintech Effect” report after conducting a survey of Americans that looked at how financial technology has helped them get through the COVID-19 pandemic. You can view the full report here and see the results that stood out for us below:

VoPay is a proud Plaid platform partner and offers businesses the ability to make EFT payments faster, verify bank accounts and reduce NSFs. You can learn more here.