Open Future World, Ozone API and UK Finance are delighted to announce the winners of the world’s first variable recurring payments hackathon. The six week event, sponsored by Accenture, Mastercard, Volt and Worldpay from FIS, was an opportunity for developers, banks, payment initiation service providers and tech platforms to demonstrate potential use cases and propositions that open banking VRPs can deliver.

Over 100 participants registered for the Hackathon and developed some great entries for the five categories of challenge: Sweeping, Subscriptions, Retail, B2B payments and Other.

The winners for each category are:

·       Sweeping: Untied. Already a pioneer of account-to-account (A2A) tax payments from their personal tax app, Untied’s concept focussed on helping customers save for tax payments using their existing calculator combined with VRP, to sweep payments and ensure they are in a position to make the payment.

·       Subscriptions: Payit™ by NatWest. Their submission showed how VRPs could be used to prevent vulnerable gamers overspending on in-game purchases, with an added feature of allowing a parent to pre-authorise limited expenditure for a child.

·       Retail: GlobalCharge with PlayStation™ who presented VRP as an open banking alternative to ‘card on file’ payments - a good example of adding to open banking payments functionality to make it a more viable alternative to cards.

·       B2B payments: Yapily with a strong use case to help SMEs collect payments faster.

·       ‘Other’: OneBanks who plan to introduce cardless cash withdrawals in their kiosks. The idea combines the trend of digitalisation, the ‘phone as wallet’ and the wastefulness of plastic cards with the reality of continuing demand for cash and its role in financial inclusion.

The full judging panel at the event consisted of Accenture's Amit Mallick, FDATA Global’s Ghela Boskovich, Innovate Finance's Janine Hirt, Mastercard’s Jim Wadsworth, NatWest Group's Stephen Wright, Open Future World's Nick Cabrera, Ozone API's Chris Michael, UK Finance's Jana Mackintosh, Volt's Steffen Vollert and Worldpay's Charles Damen.

Quotes

Jana Mackintosh, Managing Director, Payments and Innovation, UK Finance

Open banking has an exciting future and the winners of the Hackathon show exactly why. Thanks to the creativity and innovation of the entrants, we have been shown how open banking can benefit everyone from businesses to gamers, and solve customer problems from accessing cash, paying tax and collecting payments on time. As the work around open banking continues, UK Finance will continue to provide our support and we look forward to seeing more use cases come to light showing how it can improve our everyday life.

Charles Damen, SVP Payments Strategy, Worldpay from FIS

Providing a frictionless payment experience to consumers is of paramount importance to Merchants to enable the highest conversion rates. With VRP merchants have the opportunity to offer seamless Open Banking Payments for one-off purchases or subscriptions that are secure, fast and at reduced payment processing cost.

Nick Cabrera, Co-founder, Open Future World

We challenged our community to build out potential VRP applications using open banking. Given the timescales involved and the fast pace at which the payments industry is innovating, we are thoroughly impressed that the community responded with some excellent submissions that have real life applications

Steffen Vollert, Chief Technology Officer, Volt

VRPs are arguably the most significant development in Open Banking to date – a statement validated by the quality of the hackathon entries. I was hugely impressed by their ability to showcase VRPs’ real-world potential across a variety of scenarios. Congratulations to the five winners.

With variable recurring payments, consumers can authorise a third party to make payments from their bank account on a continuing basis. VRPs are widely expected to bring added impetus to the trend towards open banking payments. The Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) is introducing a requirement for the UK’s largest banks to enable VRPs.

For more information, visit vrphackathon.com.