Brankas, an open finance technology provider, has been appointed by Visa as its first regional partner to provide live access to its Open Data products. The two companies have been collaborating on data and money movement initiatives, where they had been leveraging each other’s expertise in open finance, global payments, and data intelligence.

“The shift to digital banking in Southeast Asia brings increased customer expectations from their trusted financial institutions,” said Todd Schweitzer, Co-founder and CEO of Brankas. “With this partnership, businesses are unlocking accelerated transaction processing and payment alternatives to bolster their offerings.”

These open finance products will enable financial institutions to utilize the transaction data available today to immediately improve their solution offerings.

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TrustDecision (Tongdun) and IziData are two of the pilot customers already using the joint solutions, where 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.

Digital banks, BNPLs (Buy Now Pay Laer), alternative lenders, e-commerce platforms, and Insurtechs seeking to enhance their credit decisioning capabilities can now get access to valuable, verified data that reveal 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 with 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.

“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,” said Tareq Muhmood, group country manager, regional Southeast Asia & SVP Global Client Management at Visa. “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.”