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Apply Financial’s acquisition by Accuity in early 2020 has paved the way for a new generation of data services to achieve straight-through processing – tools that could tick all the right boxes for banks and corporates, says Accuity’s Head of Global Payments and Apply Financial Founder Mark Bradbury
A winning combination The sale of transaction validation company, Apply Financial, to leading global payment data house Accuity got over the line just as the world locked down earlier this year. It was a timely exchange – at the start of an unprecedented uplift in global online payments – between two companies whose combined business is now focussed on timely exchanges. Together, they are preparing to offer a first-of-its kind package that could be one answer to the industry’s straight-through processing (STP) prayers. Apply Financial’s founder, now Accuity’s global head of payments, Mark Bradbury, reveals that the combined business is going through the approval process to become an Account Information Service Provider (AISP), offering a growing number of payment data services. For starters, it is now able to bundle account validation services – courtesy of Apply Financial – with Accuity’s existing know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities, offering the nearest thing the industry has seen to STP for global, corporate transactions. www.fintechf.com
What has made realtime STP such a challenge, thus far, according to Bradbury, is the sheer amount of data that needs to be checked before a payment can be made. Accuity will be leveraging open banking and the wider data transparency it brings, combined with the latest API technology, to achieve real-time processing in a more compliant and cost-effective manner. With Apply onboard, Accuity – owned by the RELX Group, formerly Reed Elsevier, since 2011 – now offers payment services, financial crime screening and compliance solutions to enable increasing volumes of transactions to happen faster, while identifying and preventing the corresponding increasing number of fraudulent transactions emerging as a consequence of these growing volumes. With 180 years of expertise in financial industry information, traced back through its Bankers Almanac brand, Accuity’s updated website now describes it as a ‘leading source of financial intelligence for more than 125,000 US financial institutions and 750,000 global ones, helping to validate payment codes to improve the certainty of a settlement, compress processing cycles, improve STP and assess the potential risk of onboarding new correspondent partners
around the globe to ensure compliance’. Speaking at the time of the Apply Financial acquisition, Accuity’s EVP global payments & KYC, David White, commented: “The payments industry is in the midst of a drastic transformation, with speed and efficiency at the forefront of its evolution. “In the near-term, Apply Financial’s advanced technology will enable us to offer clients a Cloud-based, real-time payments and account validation solution to dramatically increase customer STP rates and provide payments certainty. In the longer-term, the technology will fuel our innovation and enable us to deliver the next generation of payments intelligence solutions to meet our customers’ requirements.” This vision is rapidly taking shape, accelerated by COVID. “I thought the amount of payments overseas would drop due to less business going on, but the first six weeks of lockdown saw an uptick in volumes through our portal,” says Bradbury. “Some of our bigger clients then saw a drop of 20 to 30 per cent in volumes for a few months, but it’s picked up again and surged ahead. Issue 7 | ThePaytechMagazine
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