Brankas , an Open Finance technology provider, has developed ‘Brankas Open’, an open-source license for the Banking-as-a-Service and Open Finance software. The ‘Brankas Open’ license is meant to encourage digital banking and fintech innovation and lower the cost barriers for startups, neobanks, and even traditional institutions to prototype and launch new solutions, while retaining their own source code.

Customers will benefit from more choice and better user experience, as companies have open access to use, modify, redistribute, and collaborate on the publicly available Brankas Open code. The inspiration for ‘Brankas Open’ came when Brankas received a grant from the Monetary Authority of Singapore in November 2021 to develop Brankas APIX Open Core, a proof-of-concept open-source core banking system. Recognising the need for a modernised Open-Source framework to address new Open Finance technology, Brankas looked to existing open-source licensing frameworks in order to develop ‘Brankas Open’.

Brankas felt that this framework was necessary to protect community contributions, ensure open access, and comply with financial institutions' data protection and security requirements. Brankas’ recent developments In January 2022, Brankas has announced the close of its USD 20 million Series B investment round. With that round, Brankas was aiming to scale its network of more than 40 financial institutions and 100+ technology companies, expand its product menu of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) APIs serving customers across six markets in Asia, and look to double the 100-person strong team.

In October 2022, Brankas has gone live with Visa to unveil a new Open Finance solution to increase financial inclusion across Southeast Asia. Brankas has integrated Visa Cardholder Transaction Score (VCTS) and Visa's range of payment rails into its core solutions to deliver new out-of-the-box credit decisioning and payment products. Appointed by Visa as the first partner regionally to provide live access to its Open Data products, Brankas enables financial institutions to utilise the transaction data available to immediately improve their solution offerings.

Brankas and Visa have also jointly developed a new account-to-account (A2A) payment solution to enable more ways for domestic and cross-border money movement. Where are we with Open Finance? While Open Banking and the broader Open Finance movement puts competitive pressure on banks it also enables them to compete with new digital-first challengers, satisfy customer demand for friction-free, seamless digital services, and improve their margins. That is facilitated in turn by modern, application programming interface (API) enabled architecture and what the Open Finance model then allows financial institutions to do.

Core banking legacy systems and their closed architectures are often incompatible with the demands of the digital era and obstruct banks from achieving the full potential of Open Banking and the broader Open Finance movement. Digital transformation is an essential prerequisite if banks want to successfully open up new business opportunities and take advantage of the latest technologies to stay relevant in the ever-changing digital world. In Southeast Asia, Open Finance happens differently.

Without any regulatory requirement, Open Finance is led by industry. There are no regulations for banks to provide data API’s. The bottom-up innovation has happened from banks, non-bank lenders, e-wallets, and fintech in identifying and scaling new commercial models that are driven by API-based financial services.

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