Creating an Agile Payment Ecosystem in 2019 - SEEBURGER Blog
Financial Services

Creating an Agile Payment Ecosystem in 2019

| | Senior Vice President Strategic Product Management and Analyst Relations

Agile-Payment-EcosystemRespond to the technological shift by preparing your payments ecosystem with innovative solutions that leverage value-adding and profit-generating services to reduce TTM, enable flexibility and abate non-compliance risks.

As a main generator of banking income, upgrading payment hubs are at the top of the list for many financial services organizations as a key digital relationship strategy with customers. Nevertheless, integrating a payment hubs for an agile, open and flexible payments ecosystem is the greater challenge. These are some key areas to focus on for enhancing payment capabilities in 2019 for financial services organizations.

Leveraging Real-time Data Capabilities –Real-time payments continues to be a major focus for open banking and core banking renewal. However, this focus on upgrading payment hubs to real-time is not simply about updating the technology to include ISO 20022 payment structures to enable real-time transfers. New real-time payment architecture must also be a focus. Incorporating the new format also enables information that accompanies the payment data to be used for real-time monitoring, alerting, and adjusting. Banks can effectively help customers when a problem occurs, such as by identifying when and why a payment is stopped, or slow, make corrections, restart the process, or push it to the priority lane for processing.

Becoming Agile: Dealing with Disparate Payment Networks and changing Standards – Banking customers need assurance that their digital technology payment framework will adapt to support traditional networks like SWIFT, The Clearing House, and emerging payments networks like Zelle and others.  Additionally, the ability to support the ever-changing financial messaging standards (such as incorporating ISO 20022) on a global basis requires a smart adaptive infrastructure to support real-time, batch, critical, non-critical, and high/low value payments.

Enabling Open Banking by being FinTech and IoT Friendly – From increasing the number of products and services offered to customers, to the means in which they are delivered and consumed, a lack of ability to use API and other connection technologies is a key area where banking platforms are failing to address current payment needs.

According to Nielson’s 2018 total audience report, ‘’smartphones remain universally popular, reaching four out of five adults’’ in the US in a given week. Globally, mobile smartphone uptake continues to increase and customers are choosing to conduct transactions using mobile devices more and more. An agile banking platform should easily integrate technologies for open banking thereby providing innumerous opportunities such as:

  • removing information silos to create useful information interaction, for example using the distributed ledger in combination with Blockchain to enable integrity and traceability,
  • connecting corporate customers using digital onboarding techniques and automatically validating entitlements,
  • delivering tailored corporate customer payment solutions, and incorporating artificial intelligence capabilities for insight into payment data.

Open banking requires the exposure of highly sensitive information to be securely send to-and-from partners for collaborative product offerings. Regardless of the project channel or partner, agile systems must make collaboration secure and accessible. By leveraging existing data to speed-up time-to-market, reducing unnecessary duplication of information, and providing useful transparency, banks can also empower decision makers.

KYC and AML are Opportunities – The 4th AML Directive, FINCEN Financial Rule, GDPR, EIDAS and the Dodd-Frank Repeal and MOBILE Act (Or FINTRAC’s new AML rules in Canada) are a challenge to enforce with legacy systems and can hinder the customer experience; however, non-compliance can lead to hefty fines. KYC and AML integration is necessary to efficiently meet compliance regulations, but these requirements also provide an opportunity for financial services organizations to digitally onboard new customers by removing face-to-face verification and/or offline steps for identify assurance while reducing risk exposure to fines for non-compliance. Integration of KYC and AML applications via API offer banks cost savings and offer risk reduction.

Strategic vendor partnerships for IT infrastructure  – Strategic alliances for IT infrastructure are shaping the world’s leading banks facilitating better customer experience, reducing costs involved in supporting duplicate technologies and inefficient legacy systems that strangle fast execution. The expectations banking customers have of their bank is in turn redefining the expectations that banks have of their vendors. This new era increases the pressure for banks to find the right vendor who will truly become a partner to work together to prepare for future changes.

Find out how SEEBURGER partners with your financial services organization to keep up with the ever-changing payments landscape and enable an agile payment ecosystem.

Read more about our Payments Integration Hub

Get in contact with us:

Please enter details about your project in the message section so we can direct your inquiry to the right consultant.

Share this post, choose your platform!

Twitter
Ulf Persson

Written by:

As SVP Strategic Product Management and Analyst Relations, Ulf is responsible for strategic product management, product marketing, global analyst relations and leadership with regards to SEEBURGER integration technology, platform and integration services. This also includes strategic sales and marketing initiatives. Ulf works across multiple industry verticals such as Financial Services/Payments, Automotive, Logistics, Utilities, Retail, CPG and Manufacturing. Ulf has more than 30 years of global business and technology experience working with product and solution delivery of integration technologies (EAI, EDI, B2B, MFT, API, etc.), Analytics and Big Data, Cloud Services, Digital Transformation and various industry initiatives. Before joining SEEBURGER in October 2016, Ulf worked in various global leadership roles with international business integration technology and cloud services providers.