Astra, a technology company offering advanced transfer solutions between banks, announced a formal partnership with Plaid to offer integrated programmatic money movement, according to a press release.
The partnership means that companies will be able to utilize both Plaid’s Auth product and Astra’s automation platform in unison, enabling automated ACH transfers to users. Developers will also be able to build their own advanced product experiences for their customers money movement needs.
“Our team is constantly striving to make embedding financial transfers into applications as simple as possible. By providing transfer technology via our transfer API, which includes risk mitigation and automation, developers can spend less time on edge cases and more time on their product,” Astra co-founder and CEO Gil Akos said.
Astra currently offers APIs for developers that allow them to provide transfer automations, such as moving extra funds from one account to another, one-time settlement transfers and automated account refilling from depository accounts based on target balances.
The integration between the two companies means that developers will be able to call Astra’s existing APIs using the Plaid Link application; this means opening up Astra’s ACH service to over 11,000 financial institutions and 5,000 digital financial service companies built on and integrated with Plaid.
Plaid has been building up a number of other serious partnerships in the past year, such as its new collaboration with U.S. Bank, the fifth-largest financial institution in the US.
That partnership, which integrated Plaid’s API-driven financial infrastructure into the legacy bank, showcases the value of the company’s services for new and existing organizations who want to gain access into the open banking sector.
Although open banking in the US hasn’t caught up to the rest of the world, where legislation is mandating banks to offer third-party connections for unified payment systems, Plaid is doing its best to bring the concept to the biggest financial market in the world.
In other recent fintech news, Prosus announced it has agreed to purchase and merge India’s BillDesk into its existing India fintech PayU for $4.7 billion. Zilch also is approaching US expansion with its aquisition of NepFin, in attempt to bring its consumer-focused BNPL to the states.