Winners of world’s first open banking variable recurring payments hackathon announced

Ozone API, Open Future World, 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.”

Huw Davies, Chief Commercial Officer, Ozone: “Open banking payments have really started to scale in 2021, but there is potential for so many more use cases to be unlocked and variable recurring payments will be a major catalyst.

We’ve talked about it for a long time in the industry, but there’s nothing like real examples to bring the conversation to life, and that was the objective of the VRP hackathon. It’s been amazing to see the level of engagement and the winning propositions really show the art of the possible!”

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