Oct 31, 2022

Visa, Brankas team up for open data products Visa Inc. said it has tapped Brankas Digital Technologies Inc. as its first partner in Southeast Asia to offer live access to its “open data” products that could help increase financial inclusion in the region. Both companies have been collaborating on data and money movement initiatives for months, leveraging on each other’s expertise in open finance, global payments and data intelligence. According to Brankas CEO Todd Schweitzer, the digitalization of the region’s banking industry has strengthened the market’s confidence on financial institutions. Seeing the opportunity to provide solutions for businesses to offer quality customer experience, Schweitzer said their partnership allows them “to unlock accelerated transaction processing and payment alternatives to boost 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.” With these products, financial institutions can now use the current available transaction data to immediately improve their solution offerings, Schweitzer said. Two of the pilot customers—Tongdun Technology Co. Ltd. and PT IziData—are already using the joint solutions, where Brankas integrates Visa Cardholder Transaction Score (VCTS) and Visa’s range of payment rails into its core solutions to bring new “credit decisioning” and payment products. Digital banks, BNPLs (buy now, pay later services providers), alternative lenders, e-commerce platforms and Insurtechs wanting 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 significantly 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 co-developed a new account-to-account payment suite for more local and cross-border money movement means that banks and merchants can use to provide customers a new way to make instant payments while saving on transaction fees. For Visa Group Country Manager, Regional Southeast Asia and Senior Vice President for Global Client Management Tareq Muhmood, they are well positioned to empower people, businesses and governments to make more confident financial decisions and move money safely. This is well complemented by Brankas as it combines core banking, data, payments and issuance products in a single stack to allow customers to launch latest innovative solutions fast, he noted. “Visa is excited to partner with Brankas and take advantage of its extensive banking network in Southeast Asia to better serve the unbanked and underbanked,” Muhmood said.