Central 1 now live with six APIs for payments and banking host integration
Our clients — like you — are financial services providers, who every day make thoughtful choices about how best to engage customers or members with tailored solutions to meet their needs.
Central 1 gets the work done in the background for you by processing payments transactions and critical clearing and settlement activities. This allows you to focus on meeting your customers’ needs.
So how do we deliver stable, reliable payments in a world where so many of our clients are using different digital banking interface providers?
We’ve built a centralized, modular platform to offer access to payments that is secure and reliable. With increased variety in the digital banking user interfaces (UI) that our clients use to deliver their services to their customers, our clients need a standardized, reliable connection to payments utility.
Our payments services have and will continue to be delivered through a platform of standardized APIs that any digital banking provider could connect to. Today, six APIs are available, and pilot clients are already using them. They include APIs for several payment types, including Interac e-Transfer®, and banking hosts integration.
Decoupling payments connections from your digital banking system means you have the flexibility to deliver those payments and messages to your customers in the way you choose. Through our new Developer Centre, a key resource for the technical teams integrating the APIs, clients can choose what suits their needs.
Value-added benefits from Central 1 scale
Working together under the Central 1 banner brings you benefits. There’s value to the cooperative approach – sharing costs and getting access to products and services that wouldn’t otherwise be available or affordable.
We’ve been around the block a few times and we know how to take advantage of the combined scale. Our expertise in all payment types as well as new modernized payments means we have operational expertise, longstanding partnerships, industry knowledge and relationships, and this brings value as a core or hub for payments utility.
- We have connections to the major banking hosts in Canada. Our clients using APIs have payments processed without interruption because your API connects to Central 1. This enables us to make any changes for each banking host connection, once, and it’s done. Clients are protected from small technical changes from payments partners such as Interac Service uptime, meaning consistency and utility is at its optimum.
- We have direct relationships in the payments ecosystem. We are at the table in ecosystem consultation and planning — with Payments Canada, Interac, regulators and others — and are an advocate for our clients, who each have strong value propositions to deliver choice for Canadians when seeking financial services.
- We don’t compete with clients. We’re a B2B utility providing services to other organizations — we work for our clients and not as their competitor.
- We can deliver you valuable data. Our aggregated scale means the more payments services we offer to more clients, the more reliable our aggregated results for you to benchmark your own to support your strategy business decisions. This applies to payments, fraud management and much more.
- We have partners in our corner. As a collective, we attract a collection of partners with solutions adjacent to payments and financial services. This includes fraud management, cybersecurity, a new library of connections to optional services from partners, and later this year, data analysis tools.
We continue to build and release additional integration connections for the rest of the payment types and will be launching a new suite of Digital Banking APIs (again leveraging existing connections to our clients’ major banking hosts) for seamless member data retrieval.
For our existing clients, this shift to deliver via a platform of APIs will be seamless. Regardless of your digital banking provider choice, Central 1 is positioned to ensure you can retain connectivity to your banking host by providing the utility and infrastructure that the digital banking provider can leverage. In the platform method of delivery, they can take control of their own adoption of new payments functionality on your time.
Want to learn more about how Central 1’s APIs can connect you to payments services?
