APIs

A Toronto fintech is seeking share for distinct niche — and it thinks a three-year-old technology decision by Visa may be the ticket to its success.

CV Systems’ COO Randy Schmidt, BHMI Chairman Jack Baldwin and Mickey Goldwasser, vice president of Payrailz, discuss challenges and opportunities, for faster payments, back office gaps, and cross-industry cooperation.

Marqeta, which launched in 2010 with a payments platform to support payments through mobile and virtual channels, reportedly has attracted $250 million in a new funding round, which would bring its total funding amount to more than $350 million.

An executive at the Rhode Island company said the complexity of business lending remains an obstacle to switching to entirely automated, paperless operations.

Banks want to encourage innovation by extending access to outside developers, but customer data remains vulnerable while in use by an application.

Unauthorized exposure of any type of customer data, for any period of time, is a serious issue, writes Carl Wright, chief commercial officer of AttackIQ.

London-based TrueLayer says its API is a cheaper, faster and more secure way to make online payments than using credit cards or manually-entered bank transfers.

Thanks to big tech companies, the business world is moving to third-party platforms, or online marketplaces where buyers pull sellers' products off digital shelves. A growing number of financial institutions — including BBVA, Citi and community banks like Eastern — say they can't afford to sit out the trend.

Payment companies and businesses that want to leverage blockchain need to properly connect the decentralized platform they use to existing databases and back-end systems, writes IIya Pupko, chief architect at Jitterbit.

The deal between the U.S. bank and the U.K. software firm adds another potential payments rival for Swift, and the two companies will offer banking APIs to U.S. fintechs.