Afinis is a membership-based standards organization, designed to develop implementable, interoperable, and portable standards across operating environments and platforms. Afinis provides a community for thought leadership on the shared goals of expanding efficiency, surety, safety and interoperability within the financial services industry. NEACH is one of its members.
What that means in layman’s terms is that when folks from various segments of the financial services world define a need for an API (Applications Programming Interface), they will hash out the details amongst themselves and make it happen.
Once these APIs are developed, they will be freely available to members in the financial services community. (N.B. They will be available to Afinis members first. Afinis will be the ‘keeper’ of the APIs, with definitions, supply use cases, technical knowledge and the like.
Afinis is part of Nacha’s Payments Innovation Alliance Application Programming Interface (API) Standardization Industry Group (ASIG). Afinis will promote API standardization across the financial services ecosystem through formal governance and the work of Interactive Financial eXchange Forum (IFX).
Current Afinis API use cases include:
- Account Validation: helps ensure bank accounts are valid and payments are posted as desired.
- Get Bank Contact Information: allows originating financial institutions to quickly find and alert the appropriate contact within a receiving financial institution of potential fraud to prompt further investigation.
- Get Transaction Status: allows an Originator of a transaction to check the status of a submitted payment instruction.
- B2B Payments Interoperability: allows a company to obtain correct payment information and remittance requirements to pay another company.
- Initiate Payment: allows businesses to submit payment instructions and track scheduling without having to access multiple systems.
Access to the Afinis online community, developer sandbox, and the Afinis Interoperability Standards are freely available for everyone. New members are welcome to join and should contact membership@afinis.org.