The initiative led by Ixaris in collaboration with Visa, Locke Lord, Rainmaking Innovation, IDT Finance and the University of Malta has now been successfully completed.

The Open Payments Cloud (OPC) is a secure, payment industry compliant cloud-based architecture that incorporates a toolkit of diverse payment APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and a universal sandbox all on one platform. This creates an environment in which all parties - financial institutions, payment providers and developers alike - can collaborate to develop, deploy and run payment applications.

The OPC provides a way to bring together the diverse payments APIs that are increasingly being published by financial institutions and payments vendors, and delivers secure access to such payments infrastructure that goes beyond the scope of the open banking regulatory measures coming into force in 2018 under the 2nd Payment Services Directive (PSD2). The OPC platform was a finalist in the Most Disruptive Payments Technology category at the 2017 Payments Awards.

Alex Mifsud, CEO of Ixaris explains: “The financing from the EU Horizon 2020 programme for the Open Payments Ecosystem (OPE) initiative provided us with technology that greatly accelerates the scaling of our global B2B payments capabilities. For instance, as a result of this work, we can now build and iterate payments products more rapidly in response to changing customer needs in the travel sector.

“However, the OPE technology has far broader potential than simply delivering to Ixaris’ needs, and we have decided to launch, as a separate business, the Open Payments Cloud to broaden the exploitation of this technology well beyond our focus on outbound B2B payments.”

The Open Payments Cloud business will be developed in a ‘lean’ way, in collaboration with forward-looking financial institutions, fintechs and payment processors, and directed by close engagement with the developer and payments innovation community.

The creation of Open Payments Cloud sees the expansion of the Ixaris group to three distinct businesses spanning consumer and commercial payments. Others include Entropay, the first company to launch virtual prepaid cards in Europe 13 years ago and now servicing 2 million customers, and Ixaris Technologies, the fast expanding B2B payments arm of the business.