Payments Startup Aptys Supports ACH, Wire, Check Images

In Latin, the word "aptus" means fitted, connected, fastened/prepared, fitted out. The founders of payments software startup Aptys, which launches today, have loosely borrowed the term to describe the platform they have built to handle many different types of payments — such as ACH, wire, check images, Fed messages, and in-network exchange — in one place. They're marketing their product to correspondent banks, who will use it to offer payment services to their community bank clients and hopefully thereby generate revenue.

Aptys' founders, president Sean Pennock and executive vice president Eric Dotson, say that their just-completed main payments processing platform, called PayHub, has an advantage over older incumbents in that it uses 64-bit technology and takes advantage of the multithreading capabilities of multicore chips. Also, handling many types of payments in one place will help banks analyze transactions to detect fraud. Correspondent banks will be able to offer positive pay on all types of transactions, not just checks. The company's developers are working to add support for mobile and contactless payments and hope to offer such capability in a few quarters.