Visa has become a part of the ranks of companies experimenting with Phixius, a technology that assists credentialed service providers in exchanging and supervising digital payments data, NACHA said in a Wednesday (Aug. 12) announcement.
“Joining Phixius is a logical next step in the expansion of Visa’s solutions driving efficiency and delivering value-added services to buyers and suppliers,” Alan Koenigsberg, senior vice president, global head of new payment flows, Visa Business Solutions, said in the announcement.
As of now, companies mainly trade data regarding payments with deals between two parties. Those can be challenging to grow when commerce is conducted with many trading partners. However, Phixius makes these deals less necessary as it offers interoperability.
Those groups that are linked to Phixius also receive two other benefits: The platform can help with automation and reducing the impact of fraud.
To accomplish these aims, Phixius provides permissioned access to information through a common set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that takes away the necessity for information to be stored in a consolidated location.
“Visa shares our commitment to solving issues that improve the payment lifecycle for businesses and financial institutions,” NACHA Managing Director and Afinis API Standards Executive Director George Throckmorton said in the announcement. “We are excited Visa is among the first partners to pilot Phixius.”
According to a previous announcement, Phixius enables companies to exchange payment-related data to “improve fraud protection, automate manual processes and improve customer experiences.”
The technology was to use the blockchain as well as Afinis interoperable and standardized APIs in addition to ISO 20022. It was also reported in March that Ernst & Young (EY) would help out with Phixius’s creation.
Separately, NACHA released new data on ACH payments adoption and noted that ACH volume in the United States expanded by 7.9 percent in Q2 compared to the same time frame last year.