Participants in the hackathon will be entered into the OPE Live Innovation Challenge for a chance to win a cash prize for best commercial payment innovation, as well as engineering and marketing resource to take the winning commercial payments solution to market.

The OPC Hackathon has been scheduled to coincide with Innovate Finance Global Summit, which also takes place in London (10-11 April); hackathon prizes will include tickets to the summit as well as cash prizes.

The OPC is the primary outcome of the Open Payments Ecosystem (OPE) project which was conceived to drive innovation in commercial payments by making access to banking and payments infrastructure easy for developers and safe for financial institutions. The project - financed by the EU Horizon2020 programme - is an initiative led by commercial payment innovator, Ixaris Technologies, in association with Visa, Locke Lord, Rainmaking Innovation, IDT Finance and the University of Malta.

The OPC is designed to bring under a single publicly-accessible platform a diverse set of Payments APIs, which are emerging as a result of industry initiatives to open up payments. Such as:
• New Payment Services Directive (PSD2)
• The UK Competition and Markets Authority’s Open Banking remedy
• And various developer APIs released by the card schemes Visa and MasterCard.

In addition, independent payment services providers, including many of the UK’s Fintech firms active in payments would also be able to offer their APIs via the OPC as well as access other APIs to enrich their services.

“The Open Payments Cloud is a fully compliant, cloud-based platform which has been specifically created to provide a safe and secure environment for developers to build solutions to re-shape business-to-business payments. Commercial payments are still dominated by inefficient, manual processes and limited use of automation,” says Alex Mifsud, CEO of Ixaris Technologies.

Mr Mifsud explains: “The objective of the OPC is to inspire much-needed innovation in commercial transactions - a global market estimated to be worth more than $290 billion in revenue - and identify the role that technology can play in helping business and the banking industry improve payment integration, enhance efficiencies and improve transaction times.”