Our Services

Regulatory, industry and competitive drivers dictate that payment initiatives within a bank are many and continuous. Given the frequency and significance regulatory initiatives and increased scrutiny of banking regulators, the need for a structured approach to payment systems planning has never been more essential.

   

In this context, a well understood and articulated strategy for payment systems planning is a necessity.

 

We provide a structured approach to payments systems strategy definition. Using detailed intellectual collateral developed over many years, we undertake a strategy formulation process to identify the appropriate strategies to fit an organisations payments transformation problem.

Payments processing is subject to many regulatory and industry forces.  

Simplistically, for any new regulation, there is a assessment activity needed to interpret the regulatory requirements and understand the impacts to the systems processing affected. 

 

More recently game changing market regulation such as PSD2 have created new dynamics in the payments processing industry.  It is now not just about achieving regulatory compliance, but about how organisations can exploit such regulation to achieve competitive advantage.

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Having worked at the heart of the UK open banking initiative, our consultants are well versed in the current regulatory trends for open finance and in its significance for business transformation.

 

Coupled with a deep understanding of payments systems processing we are uniquely placed to assist clients in impacting such regulation, not just for the purposes of compliance, but on how to to best leverage its potential for your business.  

Exploration of  how best to utilise cloud technologies is an ongoing area of interest for many CTOs seeking to enabling low cost, resilient and scalable services.  

 

Their potential for use in payments processing is no exception. Indeed new use cases, enabled via open banking and open finance, that mean that transaction volumes and customer growth are inherently less predictable. Having a platform that that can provide high resiliency and autoscaling to meet demand offers much potential.

 

Juxtaposed against this background is the IT complexity and associated risk with migrating on premises payment services to the cloud.  

 

With a deep understanding of payments processing, coupled with experience of multiple cloud vendor technologies, we provide services to plan an effective migration to a cloud platform. We have identified migration patterns to effectively leverage the advantages of cloud technology whilst minimising the delivery risk using a phased migration approach.    

 At its core, payments processing is a systems integration problem, requiring the orchestration of systems activities across disparate and often stovepiped IT systems.  Such integration activity is driven technically by the latest technology trends for integration.

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In this respect, the current ubiquity of REST APIs means that they are the de-facto technology of choice for intra and extra-organisation system integration. Regulatory drivers are also explicitly mandating the use of this technology. 

 

Defining the API eco-system components and functional services necessary to support payments processing is a complex task.  This task is further compounded by the now variety of options for the provision of the necessary API services (legacy enablement | SaaS | microservices).  

 

We work with a client to define a coherent API strategy to support payments modernisation or to meet an organisations broader digital transformation needs.

The technological landscape for payments processing is continually evolving. Furthermore, trends towards Banking as a Service (BaaS) means that key services within the payments value chain have the potential to be provided by 3rd parties 'in the cloud' whereas traditionally these would have been deployed in house.

 

Understanding the features, benefits and performance characteristics associated with 3rd party products and a SaaS service provision model is key to understanding technology adoption risk.

 

We have extensive experience in vendor selection and  technology comparisons for key payments processing components such as payments engines and gateways.  In line with our model for client engagements, the evaluation and selection process is always highly tuned to an organisations' specific needs.

Payments solutions are demanding in that they require a deep understanding of payments scheme processing and settlement cycles. The range of payments schemes and their operating characteristic are many and varied. They range form bulk oriented payments to instant payments with highly demanding non functional requirements processing millions of transaction per day within strict service levels.

 

Historically we have provided solutions for all UK and European payment schemes and related  payment processing problems such as wholesale cash management and liquidity management. 

 

Our solutioning process is underpinned by a detailed systems model of the payments value chain. Furthermore, we have developed mature architectural patterns for  payments systems integration and so there is absolute clarity on the architectural paradigm being adopted and the target architectural state being sought.

 

We always adopt a mantra that every solution is unique for a given client so the payments value chain models and architecture patterns are always tailored to specific client needs.