Fireside chat with Mark Bradbury from Apply Financial
Apply Financial has been in business for over 8 years and provide the de facto standard Payment Validation API called Validate to over 700 global clients including Barclays and HSBC. Validate is now helping over 400,000 payments a day to reach the correct accounts on time by removing human and data error and dramatically improving the customer experience. Here, Mark Bradbury, CEO and Founder of Apply Financial, shares some thoughts on working with Temenos.
How does Apply Financial complement Temenos offering?
As Temenos are working hard to deliver a digital solution to their new and existing clients, we are in the sweet spot of that journey with our API based validation tool, Validate API. Validate API gives Temenos’ clients a totally integrated validation solution that is seamless and easy to deploy.
What value does your product provide to Temenos clients?
Validate API provides an intuitive payment entry experience for users and guides them through the process of entering the correct payment information no matter which country they are sending the payment to. Validate API puts the validation at the beginning of the payment lifecycle and removes both human and data error saving Temenos clients significant time and money that would have been spent on fixing failed or lost payments if they had not deployed Validate API.
What made you start a bank payment validation company?
My long experience of working with payment institutions had shown that one of the biggest cost and operational issues is dealing with failed payments due to human or data errors. I created Apply Financial to provide a self-service cloud and API service that would eradicate human error from bank payments.
How does using Validate API cut the cost for banks making global payments?
Validate API seamlessly integrates into payment screens and helps the user enter the correct beneficiary information to ensure a payment STP’s. By doing this Validate removes the potential for error and significantly reduces the burden on back office support and call centers.
Why does using cloud-based payment rules and reference data make it easier for a bank?
Prior to our Validate API being launched the only option was to purchase and download global reference data, clean that data and to build all the rules and functionality required to validate a payment in house. Validate API removes to the need to do any downloads or to build any functionality around validation.
How does Validate improve the banks customers journey?
Validate is designed to make entering the correct beneficiary details really simple. The customer enters the country and from there on in Validate provides the correct fields and prompts to help the customer complete all the necessary information to make sure the payment STP’s. In addition, the customer has field by field assistance to help explain what is needed, why and correct examples. This is designed to help not only experienced payment makers but also first time users.
Is it easy for our banking customers to integrate to Validate API?
Validate API is a REST based solution and is very simple deploy. Once integrated all the different functions are easy to access web service calls so banks can take advantage of a few or many functions through a single API. We recently had a client deploy the API in 5 mins ready for testing.
We notice you are sponsoring the Payment Race at Money 20/20 for mobile, tell us about your involvement.
This is our second year sponsoring the race, last year we sponsored Cards and won! This year we are sponsoring Mobile and are supporting them with advice on mobile payment providers country by country and best places to travel through to maximise the number of countries covered during the 10 day round the world race. It’s such a great event and look forward to an exciting race with lots of fun video footage.