The world’s first Open Banking Variable Recurring Payments Hackathon

Leading brands in the world of open banking today announced an important new open banking challenge: The VRP Hackathon. It is organised by Open Future World, Ozone API and UK Finance and sponsored by Accenture, Mastarcard, VOLT and Worldpay.

Up until now, open banking has been focused on one-time payments, but changes to the UK’s open banking standard will enable a much broader range of real time payments, including intelligent movement of money between accounts, regular subscription and bill payments and embedded one click e-commerce.

Collectively these payments are known as Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) and are set to transform the payments landscape over the coming years. The Hackathon is an opportunity for developers, banks, payment initiation service providers and tech platforms to demonstrate potential use cases and propositions that VRPs can deliver.

The inclusion of VRPs in the latest UK Open Banking standard was a significant moment and the hackathon aims to showcase what can be achieved in this area and how consumers can benefit. Given the UK is at the forefront here, other markets and standards bodies globally will be watching developments with keen interest.

The VRP Hackathon will take place over 4 weeks, starting on 13 September. Participants are invited to apply from today via this link: www.vrphackathon.com

In order to support this challenge, Ozone who is powering the platform for the hackathon has updated its fully transactional Ozone Sandbox to support the latest version of the OBIE standard, incorporating VRPs.

As well as the significant kudos and publicity teams will get by entering this hackathon, each of the six category winners will receive a bespoke 12-month plan of promotion and support from Open Future World worth well in excess of £10,000.

QUOTES

Jana Mackintosh, Managing Director, Payments & Innovation, UK Finance
“UK Finance has always been a strong supporter of open banking, which is already benefiting millions of UK consumers and businesses.

Expanding into variable recurring payments provides a great opportunity for the industry to collaborate and for firms to demonstrate what open banking can deliver next.

We are excited to see what new ideas and initiatives come out of this hackathon and are proud to be involved in it.”

Chris Michael, Chief Executive Officer, Ozone API

“VRPs have real potential to transform payments – improving customer experience and security for banks, merchants and end customers, as well as reducing settlement times, complexity and costs.

We are delighted to be providing the enabling technology for this hackathon, as a catalyst to help firms develop and showcase their propositions in advance of the UK banks having their APIs live next year.”

Nick Cabrera, Co-Founder, Open Future World

“Regulators, banks and fintechs around the world will be closely watching the development of VRPs. We hope this hackathon will provide them with some early examples of what is possible.

Open Future World is proud to support this important initiative and look forward to supporting the VRP innovators and payments game changers who will make an impact in the years to come”

CONTACT: Nick Cabrera, Open Future World

+44 203 397 7458 or nick@openfuture.world