Smarter Payments for Banks : Three concepts to know
Financial Services

Smarter Payments for a Digital-ready Bank

| | Senior Vice President Strategic Product Management and Analyst Relations
Banks today need smarter payments to stay competitive.

Changing global markets are increasing the demand for new real-time payment services. At the same time, new payment methods such as app-based banking and contactless payments are further driving the need for modernization and digitalization in the financial industry.

Three concepts banks should embrace in order to remain competitive

In fact, according to KPMG, payments is a huge area for innovation and change in financial services. “As tech giants steadily grow their payment services, and new fintechs emerge offering mobile e-wallets or flexible ‘buy now pay later’ options that have seen increased take-up recently in some geographies, traditional financial institutions risk seeing their market shares being eroded around them and losing the primacy they hold in the customer relationship.”[1]

Indeed, banks must work harder than ever to stay profitable and be digitally relevant in a competitive landscape of new service providers, innovative payment methods[2] and regulatory pressures. Modernization and digitalization, the building blocks for innovative and frictionless payment models, have become competitive requirements for financial services. So what can financial institutions do to remain competitive in the digital world of smarter payments?

In this blog, I’ll review three concepts that can help.

1) Realize more value from payments and the data they provide.

The power of data lies in being able to create unique customer experiences, and at the same time, work with standards to your advantage. The ISO 20022 standard, for example, is a value-driver that will provide a lot more data about payment transactions, and can be a catalyst to new services. However, many organizations are not equipped for the transformation required to migrate to ISO 20022, and will have to create a clearly defined strategy including new, modernized infrastructure to handle all the data and help ensure compliance.

European bank/insurance company KBC wanted the ability to develop new business features, to update current features, and to solve challenges it was having with business growth. SEEBURGER provided them with a solution to enable faster partner onboarding and meet their regulatory needs such as GDPR compliance that scales with their business.

To really take advantage of your modern applications and gain actionable insights from reliable sources of data you can trust, you typically need an agile, cloud-ready integration platform that can securely aggregate data across siloed systems for business continuity and growth.

2) Smarter, faster payments improve the customer experience.

Your approach to payments can either tie you more closely with your customers or become a point of difficulty. Customers and business partners expect you to have modern payment services, such as Open Banking, which they can use in real time, and if you don’t, they may go elsewhere. Payment services must be easy to use and always available, with minimal road blocks to utilize the services.

At the end of the day, as long as we can manage, secure and share information, the benefits of modern payments are all about trusted data, presented in the right format, for the right stakeholder at the right time.

Integration and automation are critical to modern payment methods. Just ask Anders Öman, Global Channel Manager at European financial group SEB. Anders has been digitizing processes for years, and is now well-prepared for the expectations of customers and the requirements of modern payment processing. “We are now offering any product type and any format type to be integrated into the same integration setup. We are automating everything that has to do with delivery,” he said. “It’s basically straight-through processing of any message type. This enables our customers to expand their business process automation.With this capability, bank customers can process payments more quickly, meeting expectations.

3) A modernization strategy requires the cloud.

Building a smarter payments infrastructure typically requires an agile, scalable cloud-ready integration platform, including an open API-based framework that enables you to seamlessly integrate your channels, corporates, partners, vendors, etc. across your ecosystem. This platform should be delivered in the cloud or support a hybrid model that has the scalability to handle future growth.

According to Gartner, cloud adoption has been a turning point for banks, now that data security, TCO and agility have all improved.[3]

Strategy, Execution and Integration

The journey to smarter, faster payments requires detailed planning and execution. To get started on this modernization journey in a structured manner, banks need to optimize their legacy systems for agility, scalability and connectivity through integration with newer payment platform initiatives.

For MoneyGram International, SEEBURGER has been instrumental in their modernization journey. “The SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has been an effective solution that has allowed us to simplify our architecture, reduce total cost of ownership and better serve our consumers, agents and partners,” said Veronica Larson, Head of IT Operations. MoneyGram has improved security, flexibility and compliance to increase customer satisfaction as a result.

In fact, SEEBURGER handles integration and modernization for many financial services institutions across the globe. “We have been working with financial organizations, including some of the world’s largest banks, for years,” said Sebastian Schorpp, Executive Vice President and Head of Financial Services Group, SEEBURGER. “As their business grows and evolves, our platform is able to help them make the connections that drive business, and we’ll continue to do so long into the future.”

By choosing a cloud-ready hybrid integration platform that ensures the secure, continuous flow of payments data, as well as connectivity to legacy, on-premises and cloud-native services, financial institutions can:

  • Support the journey towards delivering agile, safe, simple-to-use, customer facing applications
  • Accelerate the implementation of modern payments technologies
  • Prepare for ISO 20022 usage (including best practice approach for migration if needed)
  • Drive interoperability between legacy and new technology
  • Connect to any application, on-premises or in the cloud
  • Increase digital knowledge across IT and business teams
  • Enable open banking for new revenue streams
  • Ensure regulatory compliance

SEEBURGER – Why We’re Different

As your payments business grows and evolves, your integration solution needs the scalability, agility and security to handle whatever comes your way—without excessive coding fees when your integration needs change. The SEEBURGER Payments Integration Hub accelerates real-time payments and seamless data transfers with future-ready, agile core banking technology. That means your integrations are pure and smooth, and your data flows where it’s supposed to, when it’s needed. It will help you to prepare for:

  • Smarter and faster payments
  • Innovation and new services that improves the customer experience
  • Open banking initiatives
  • Automate and monitor business processes
  • ISO 2002 usage

Share business-critical data. Make split-second decisions. Operate at scale. It’s all possible with SEEBURGER Integration – a mix of our technology, our services and our people – all here for the sole purpose of accelerating your business. At SEEBURGER, we simplify complex connections between clouds, applications and people, so you can focus on creating intuitive payment experiences that matter to your customers.

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[1] KPMG, “Banks Look to Invest and Innovate to Preserve Their Place in Tomorrow’s Digital Economy”, Ian Pollari, Anton Ruddenklau, Sven Korschinowski, September 2021

[2] Finextra, “5 Digital Payment Trends in 2021”, Abhinav Paliwal, June 22, 2021

[3] Gartner, “Core Banking Hot Spot: Moving the Core Into the Cloud, Vittorio D’Orazio, September 3, 2021.

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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.