Form3 teams with Apply Financial for payments validation
Payments and cloud – a perfect match
Form3, a cloud-based fintech firm launched last year, has partnered with payments validation company Apply Financial.
The deal enhances Form3’s Payments-as-a-Service platform with “automation services to validate, enrich, and fix single and bulk payments”, Form3 says.
“By integrating Apply Financial’s APIs, clients will achieve 100% STP [straight-through processing] rates, as well as secure data and complying with regulatory requirements,” the company states.
Form3 offers an end-to-end solution for global payments processing. It includes APIs for clients to connect with their banks as well as directly into payment systems such as Faster Payments, Bacs, SEPA, Chaps and Swift, “without a complex web of disparate technologies”.
At Form3’s launch at last year’s Sibos conference, it said its back office operations would be supported by payments specialist Dovetail. There was also mention of core banking software services offered by Form3 and provided by another UK start-up Thought Machine.
However, not a word is spoken about the core in the latest announcement, with Form3 focusing solely on the payments sector now. Also, Dovetail is no longer involved.
The company is currently targeting the UK market, pitching its services to the established and challenger banks, building societies, payment institutions and deposit-taking foreign bank branches.
To Banking Technology’s knowledge, it is yet to onboard its first customer.
UPDATE 14 June 2017: Form3 has also partnered with another pay tech company, Icon Solutions, to offer customers payments processing across Europe. Form3 says the agreement will provide its clients with direct technical access to the Euro Banking Association (EBA) to initiate and receive real-time SEPA payments, when the new SEPA Inst scheme goes live in November 2017.
It has also teamed up with ComplyAdvantage, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) driven risk data and compliance technology. The deal will provide Form3’s Payments-as-a-Service platform with sanction screening services for cross-border payments.
