OpenTransact

The worlds simplest spec for financial transactions

Payments and finance are today governed by lots of different incompatible complex legacy standards developed over the last 40 years. These standards make it hard to interoperate and innovate in the financial space.

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OpenTransact aims to create the equivalent of the HTTP standard for financial transactions. It is based on established well known HTTP, REST and OAUTH standards. You can use the same standard and implementation code to handle everything from currency payments to loan issuance and stock trades.

Transfer Request

Request payment from a customer. All you have to do is create a link like below.

Transfer Authorization

Request authorization to perform a payment from a customer. All you have to do is create a link like below.

Transfer

An application has a previously issued OAuth token to perform delegated transfers on behalf of a user.

http://pay.test/usd?amount=10.00&to=you@example.com&note=Milk

Click to try

http://pay.test/usd?amount=10.00&to=you@example.com&note=Milk&redirect_uri=http://site.com/callback&client_id=1234

If user authorizes it payment is not performed immediately, rather an OAuth token is issued to you which allows you to charge when ready. 

POST /transactions/usd HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer ad180jjd733klru7
Content-length: 239

amount=10.00&to=you@example.com&note=Milk

OAuth token is either authorized using a regular OAuth authorization request or through a Transfer Authorization.

Use cases:
  • Simple shopping carts
  • Invoicing software
  • Donation

Merchants can integrate this into an existing site with no or little programming. See the spec for more details.

Use cases:

Some simple web programming skills are necessary. See the spec for more details.

Use cases:
  • Subscriptions
  • Mobile payments
  • Payment devices

Some simple web programming skills are necessary. See the spec for more details.

How does it work?

See some of these common use cases: