A new development platform launched Tuesday claims to help banks and fintechs offer faster automated ACH transactions at less cost than building an ACH connection.

The company, Astra, has an ACH API platform that targets fintechs and banks in the market to replace their legacy systems, CEO Gil Akos told Bank Automation News. ACH transactions are the electronic transfer of funds between financial institutions.

The new platform uses an API to process ACH transactions, Akos said. The API is backed by a platform that incorporates an automation engine to execute the transactions and an orchestration layer that manages when transfers should happen. As part of that decisioning system, the tool can determine whether a transfer should go through if, for example, there isn’t enough money in the account.

The goal is to make ACH easier for developers who want to build automated transfer routines. ACH transfers are often used to fund cash cards or accounts, but without an engine to automate this, companies must rely on the customer to go manually into their bank account to set up a transfer. This is the point at which many potential customers are lost. Businesses want to drive the transfer from within their own applications or tools, without requiring the manual step — and Astra’s platform supports this, Akos said.

Other companies do offer automated ways to move money, a trend fintechs call “self-driving money.” Wealthfront, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based fintech founded in 2008, can transfer money from an internal cash account or an external checking account using data aggregator Yodlee for the integration. Wealthfront has more than $23 billion of assets under management. Likewise, the $3.2 trillion JPMorgan Chase offers Chase Autosave, which will move money between accounts. Wealthfront and Chase Autosave, however, are custom integrations and solutions and not offered as a development platform for other companies to use.

One target market for Astra would include fintechs, which Akos said often struggle to create their own ACH transfer systems. The company has been in development mode during the past two years and has raised $1.7 million in two funding rounds, according to Crunchbase.

“We’ve talked with a lot of early-stage companies that have tried to offer faster transfers for their end users, and it’s turned into a massive cost center,” Akos said. “We specifically designed our platform for a range of use cases, anything from early-stage fintech startups to more mature financial institutions, so that they can automate bank transfers directly in their products through our API and eliminate the challenges around failures or fraud.”

Akos claims Astra’s platform is more reliable than the traditional ACH transfer system, and although the company said it already has customers from its beta test, he declined to say who those clients are.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.