Did this ever happen to you? - High fees required for basic settlement services
- Wasted time implementing the custom third party financial settlement service APIs?
- Wasted time normalizing transaction handling across disparate financial settlement service providers?
- Need to implement a completely new financial settlement service to gain access to a new market?
- Had a customer who wants to pay you but doesn't have a credit card?
- Questionable accounting from online settlement partners?
- Wasted time handling processing of chargebacks?
- Get hit with fraud liability on a transaction you couldn't reasonably do anything about?
IFEX aims to be the first truly comprehensive financial settlement protocol with the promise to normalize the offerings of settlement service providers.
Instead of signing up for individual settlement services and wading through legalese, your systems can access multiple settlement providers through IFEX. These settlement providers are encouraged through free market competition to provide objective, measurable metrics on their services including digital signatures guaranteeing the service quotations they provide. (Note that facility for 'best effort', ambiguous, maximum/minimum/average or other rough estimate metrics is also under consideration). Based upon these metrics, your systems can use simple policies to guide them in the selection of an appropriate settlement provider for each transaction. - Minimise fees
- Minimise latency in settlement
- Eliminate credit card fraud liability hassles
- Clearly manage explicit information regarding chargeback/reversal/cancellation potential of any given settlement
- Provide settlement services to a larger market, minimizing settlement method friction in the purchase process and increasing sales
- Develop safe in the knowledge that your financial systems are both internationalized and ready for emerging settlement paradigms such as mobile, NFC, and digital currencies.
As an open protocol, IFEX will provide these benefits at no cost. In addition, one or more open source implementations will be made available, including a complete IFEX transaction accounting server. Simply write your local integration, and reap the rewards of a free financial services market. Already available are: - IMIC - a system for the open identification of internet-based financial markets
- IIBAN - a system for the open identification of internet-based financial endpoints
- X-ISO4217-A3 - a system for the open identification of currencies and currency-like commodities
The IFEX protocol for open financial transaction negotiation is currently under development, and you are invited to participate by providing feedback and suggestions. |