SPX™ platform
Request to Pay Integration | White label services
Simple, secure, low risk – the future of bill payments is here.
SPX™ from Answer Pay is the keystone of the Request to Pay ecosystem.
It manages the identities of participants and securely routes bill payment messages to the correct destinations.
SPX™ connects invoice management systems (typically offered by banks) and bill payment applications (such as retail bank apps, digital wallets or personal finance managers)
Why use our platform?
Our API gives secure, unified access to financial institutions, enabling the integration of digital invoices and cash collection by bank transfer and powered two-way communication with payers.
Lower Costs
Offer your customers better rates compared to cheque, cash and card payments while increasing transaction returns.
Improve UX
Adopt pay request styled digital payments to displace cash, card and cheque payments and win a higher share of the customer wallet.
Improved Payment Conversion
Give customers their choice of bill payment methods and options to part pay, improving conversion.
Digital bill payments have evolved
Request to Pay is a newly introduced messaging protocol that equips payers to bring together all bills into one place. It’s set to transform existing bill payment experiences—such as paper invoices or pay by link services—into digitally networked two-way dialogues.
Our API gives secure, unified access to financial institutions, enabling the integration of digital invoices and cash collection by bank transfer and powered two-way communication with payers.
Making Request to Pay adoption simple
While RTP is well documented, it’s still not a plug-and-play solution. That’s why Answer Pay—a Pay.UK accredited technical solution provider—developed SPX, a connectivity and message routing SaaS platform.
It installs an extra layer of tooling to allow the RtP protocol to be adopted into existing banking and PSP apps without becoming a drain on internal development teams. SPX allows providers to fully outsource the complexity of RtP implementation and the pains of ongoing administration.
Designed to enable rather than replace, services will be fully branded by a PSP allowing them to control KYC, request initiation and management. This means that a biller using an API or portal from their PSP for cash collection today can be empowered to use Request to Pay through that same interface tomorrow reducing any potential friction.
On-demand scalability
Request to Pay is not a ‘fire and forget’ technology implementation. As demand continues to increase across the service, and more and more participants join, the work overhead to manage the connectivity and testing of new entrants can quickly become overwhelming for internal tech teams.
Working with a certified RTP service provider like Answer Pay means that, every time a new party joins the ecosystem, they are onboarded and made available to all the PSP customers of that solution provider. This is critical, as the more participants, the more opportunity for interaction. A provider like Answer Pay is able to do this more efficiently than internal teams as it is their core function, and the associated service delivery costs are shared by multiple customers to bring economies of scale.
Keeping up with the global roll-out of RTP standards
Pay.UK has developed a standard focused on the UK. There are different standards emerging in other countries and regions. Of particular interest will be the new European standard given many PSPs operate in a multi-region environment. The good news here is that the UK standard has been constructed with ISO20022 in mind, the same standard that the European Payments Council has used for its ‘SEPA Request to Pay,’ making it easier to communicate between the two.
Request to Pay is a global phenomenon and, as it takes off, the variety of connectivity options are making it easier than ever to be a part of the story. PSPs can leverage technical solution providers like Answer Pay to get the ownership and control of a build-it-yourself model, with faster time to value made possible by partnering.
Get connected to Request to Pay
We step you through the onboarding journey to install Request to Pay:
- Take advantage of our plug and play technology
- Leverage our know-how to fast-track your project
In June 2020, Answer Pay became the first certified provider of Request to Pay services, and the first to complete live transactions.
Why choose us?
Responsive app enabler
Banks want to focus their internal digital spend towards last-mile customer interface that maximise R&D returns. But, thanks to Request to Pay, that doesn’t stop them looking toward the next big change in digital payments; adopting a platform that enhances their app investments—with the added benefits of being easily integrated, always secure, and one that empowers vulnerable bill payers.
Digital platform advantages
As a recent EY report on platform-based banking puts it—“In the digital economy, you can become a driver without owning a taxi, a hotelier without owning a hotel, or a bookseller without owning a bookstore.” Digital platforms accelerate innovation by empowering banks and other businesses to enhance their customer mobile apps with ready-to-play integrations that add instant value without placing fresh demands on in-house digital teams.
Simplified integration
Platform business success stories like Airbnb, Uber and Just Eat show just how much digital consumers value simplified integration made possible by digital platforms. With a user-friendly interface and easy navigation, app users decreases search time and increases satisfaction, fulfilling their needs in a faster and more efficient way. When it comes to mobile payments, Answer Pay has built a digital platform formed around the UK standards-based messaging infrastructure Request to Pay, to give banks first mover advantage in secure mobile payments from their apps.
Secured mobile payments
Providers of pay by link solutions—i.e., Where a biller requests payment via an unsecured public URL link—argue that it is a straightforward and secure way to get paid through a simple payment link. Such solutions ignore decades old Information Security industry guidance, calling on consumers ‘not to click on links’ that allows hackers to create phishing attacks fake landing pages. Request to Pay solutions from Answer Pay are a viable alternative to pay by link.
Case study
An Open Banking powered payments provider wanted to increase the engagement with their customer facing app.
Struggling with a high rate of churn our client was excited by the opportunity to increase customer engagement in their app. By embedding the receipt of payment requests, their customers would have an unavoidable need to come back time and again. However building and maintaining Open Banking connectivity across Europe is complex and they did not want to distract from this core part of the service. So they chose to connect using Answer Pay’s SPX™ platform.
Connecting to SPX™ allowed them to leverage our pre-certified platform and APIs to significantly reduce their time to market. Plus as new parties join the Request to Pay ecosystem, SPX™ automatically makes them available reducing ongoing maintenance costs too. The solution was fully white labelled and embedded in their existing application making it easy for customers to adopt.
They are now seeing their payments volume build and are gaining new customers.
