Visa and Brankas Unveil New Open Finance Products

Brankas has successfully integrated Visa Cardholder Transaction Score (VCTS) and Visa’s broad 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 will enable financial institutions to utilize the transaction data available today to immediately improve their solution offerings.

Digital banks, BNPLs, alternative lenders, ecommerce platforms, and Insurtechs seeking to enhance their credit decisioning capabilities can now get access to valuable, verified data that reveals a cardholder’s aggregated spend insights and creditworthiness. This dramatically improves risk evaluation methods and enables automated credit decisioning to facilitate faster processing of services such as loans and credit card issuance.

Brankas and Visa have also jointly developed a new Account-to-Account payment solution to enable more ways for domestic and cross-border money movement. Using Brankas’ established banking network in Asia and Visa’s global payment rails, banks and merchants can now provide customers a new way to make instant payments while saving on transaction fees. An e-commerce customer, for instance, would be able to make secure cross-border payments directly from his or her bank account without having to enter card credentials.

Todd Schweitzer, CEO and Co-founder of Brankas said, “The shift to digital banking in Southeast Asia brings increased customer expectations from their trusted financial institutions. We recognize a real opportunity to bring to market a solution to help businesses offer a superior customer experience. With this partnership, businesses are unlocking accelerated transaction processing and payment alternatives to bolster their offerings. We are very excited to team up with Visa to increase financial inclusion across Southeast Asia, and we believe that our joint solutions will do just that.”

Brankas is no stranger to growth enablement for its 80+ enterprise customers across Southeast Asia in banking, fintech, payment, and e-commerce. Its flagship product, Open Finance Suite, enables financial institutions to open up new revenue and distribution channels in a matter of weeks. By becoming API-enabled, these financial institutions can allow authorized third party partners to facilitate payment, account opening, lending, and data sharing services for them. Earlier in 2022, Netbank launched its first suite of digital banking solutions in the Philippines on the back of Brankas’ Open Finance Suite.

Tareq Muhmood, Group Country Manager, Regional Southeast Asia & SVP Global Client Management at Visa, said, “As a trusted engine of commerce, Visa is uniquely positioned to help people, businesses, and governments make more confident financial decisions and move money securely. Brankas is a company that combines core banking, data, payments, and issuance products in a single stack, enabling their customers to rapidly launch new and innovative solutions. Visa is excited to partner with Brankas and take advantage of its extensive banking network in Southeast Asia to better serve the underbanked.”

This announcement comes on the back of months of collaboration between Visa and Brankas on data and money movement initiatives, where the two companies had been leveraging each other’s expertise in Open Finance, global payments, and data intelligence. Visa previously participated in Brankas’ Series B funding round, after Brankas participated in Visa’s AP Accelerator program.