Basiq adds External payment sources to its Affordability API

By Edil Corneille

Manly-based Basiq has added External payment sources to its Affordability API to help companies get a complete picture of customer’s liabilities. The External Liabilities uncovers loans with ‘buy-now-pay-laters’ and other alternative lenders so that customers can manage debt and make repayments.

This will surface repayments from a customer’s everyday transactions, whether it’s with payment providers or alternative lenders. It can be used to upgrade lending, personalise collections, and help customers manage debt, among others.

Any loan repayments detected from transaction accounts and everyday expenses will be tagged as External and aggregated with a customer’s liabilities across credit cards, mortgages and personal loans. The endpoint will return data on the first and last repayment, how many repayments have been made, average and total repayment amounts as well as the details of each individual payment.

To help get a better feel of what can be done with the feature, the sandbox environment of Basiq allows for testing it out with a user who has irregular income over the last 13 months, gambling expenditure, BNPL activity, and higher than expected expenditure in some categories.

Basiq is an aggregation platform for acquiring financial data. It provides secure access to financial institutions through a simple set of RESTful APIs. In November 2020, the company partnered with San Francisco-based Plaid, a data network powering thousands of digital financial tools, to expand developers’ financial access and consumer access to open finance. Together, Basiq and Plaid enable their clients to expand into new markets and disrupt financial services on a global scale.