How an Integrated Payment System can transform Accounts Payable to help banks and customers

Terra-forming the payment landscape within accounts payable to keep pace with the recent accelerated technological developments in the financial industry hasn’t been easy. Why? Because despite their flaws, legacy systems and processes still get the job done. But with the prevalent environment, dallying might give your competition the chance to get a step ahead in the game. How? By using an integrated payment system.

The existing Accounts Payable scenario.

In the US, despite the advent of the Automated Clearing House (ACH) and the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) Systems, payments have been slow in their path to evolution, desperate to keep up with the metamorphosing digital payments era. And although antiquated payment approaches such as the physical checks are on a steady decline, they still see considerable usage.

The convoluted legacy payment infrastructure within a lot of banks also inadvertently adds to an already troubling problem. Complicated due to interconnected fragments such as payment types, currencies and acquired Clearing and Settlement Mechanisms (CSM), the payment landscape within banks is often tethered by its age-old legacy systems. Such a legacy payment infrastructure often limits a bank’s potential to offer a better and faster accounts payable customer experience.

Quite evidently, the amalgamation of such technological building blocks has created bottlenecks for banks in the form of spaghetti architecture.

Disadvantages of the obsolete spaghetti architecture.

With a global pandemic in play, banks and customers alike have been forced to transition to a digital model, accelerating the rate of digital adoption within the financial industry. Despite the costs associated with educating the customers, at Go-Live Faster, we believe that segueing away from the traditional to the digital will ultimately lead to a better customer experience.

As a result, complications arising from legacy payment systems have begun to stimulate a larger number of banks towards an integrated payment system. Among the several problems observed within the existing payment legacy systems, we have taken the liberty to highlight a few of the most important ones:

1. Reduced transparency in payment processes.
2. Technical breakdowns, which create further payment related problems.
3. Longer integration time frames birthed from legacy systems with obsolete enhancements.
4. The need to handle multiple file formats.
5. An unnecessarily complicated and multi-layered payment process resulting in slower transactions and reduced operational efficiency.

Such roadblocks birth the need to optimize the existing technology by modernizing the accounts payable process through an integrated payment system.

What is an Integrated Payment System?

A treasury management solution - that is what an integrated payment system effectively is. It can help streamline payment processes, reduce costs and improve operational efficiency both for a bank and its customers.

Integrated Payables are the back-end to the Accounts Payable. Through an Integrated Payments hub, banks can create a payment platform that can liaise with multiple systems. Commercial and retail banks can effectively build an omni-channel connection capable of breaking past bottlenecks presented by their legacy infrastructure.

How can an Integrated Payment System benefit a bank?

Aside from the improved operational efficiency and reduced operating expenses in the entire account payable process, some of the other key advantages of incorporating integrated payment include:

1. Increased payment transparency.
2. Higher capabilities to handle a growing volume of payments.
3. An overhaul of the existing payment system, which replaces legacy infrastructure.
4. Aggregation of data (that can be used for analytics).
5. An ease in the ability to integrate newer offerings

How can an Integrated Payment System benefit a bank’s customers?

A growing cadre of businesses are looking to improve their entire accounts payable process. Offering such a disruptive accounts payable automation enables banks to provide a holistic solution that caters to the entire accounts payable process and addresses a broad range of customer pain points such as:

1. Time and Cost saving - By providing increased transparency in payments, customers spend less time executing check runs, printing and mailing. It cuts down on the time wasted in administering processes. This translates into cost savings in the form of an efficient payment process.
2. Reduced Risk of Fraud - Most Integrated Payment systems are PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) certified. This means that they meet the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council’s requirements.
3. Greater Accuracy - By automating the accounts payable process, integrated payments eliminate human error from the equation. Fewer errors equates to fewer losses.
4. Increased cash flow - By leveraging automation in the accounts payable process, banks can reduce the payments processing turnaround. This will give their customers the opportunity to take advantage of supplier discounts.

Rather than remaining solely as a solution provider, with integrated payments, commercial and retail banks have the opportunity to become strategic partners for their customers. Providing an end-to-end accounts payable solution will drive customer loyalty. It will present a chance to banks to differentiate themselves from their competition.

When other banks approach your customers, the switching costs associated with going back to a manual accounts payable will likely deter your customers from making the switch.

Next Steps to an Integrated Payment System!

The advent of the Integrated Payables system has been a game changer for the financial industry. It is the Holy Grail that can modernize a bank’s payment infrastructure and benefit both a bank and its customers.

But tighter budgets, domain knowledge and timelines within the prevalent market scenario can make implementing integrated payments a daunting task. One way of circumventing these challenges is by partnering with a specialist such as Go-Live Faster. Go-Live Faster is a global fintech solutions firm that has helped multiple banks accelerate their product releases by making technology implementations predictable.

Our analysts understand the risks that could derail your treasury management system implementations. They are in a position to help you avoid those pitfalls, all while ensuring that you quite literally Go-Live Faster.

Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do?

PAYMENTS 2018 unites thousands of payments system stakeholders from business end-user and financial and technology services organizations to debate and explore pressing issues and opportunities. At this year’s event is the executive series presentation on ‘Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do’ by Go-Live Faster’ CEO, Krishna Iyer. Here are the session details:

Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do?

As businesses and consumers begin to demand smarter and faster payments, solutions are being developed to meet their needs. However financial institutions often come across the challenge of slower implementations that are highly detrimental in terms of time and cost. Once a financial institution has fully executed a solution, the rules of the game may have changed impacting investments and revenue growth. In a world where everything is changing so rapidly, financial institutions need to move quickly from conception to commercialization to stay ahead of the game. Faster implementations are imperative to gain competitive advantage in the current environment of fast-evolving technology and customer needs. In this session, you will hear from industry experts on what it takes to roll out faster payments, and what executives must do for faster turnaround of projects.

Join us to Discover:

• How to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to cut implementation time
• Key lessons from a case study of an accelerated complex implementation
• How to ensure your financial institution meets its predicted go-live date

 

• Date & Time:  Tuesday, May 1st | 10:15 am - 11:05 AM
• Venue: PAYMENTS 2018 | San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA.
• Request a Meeting: Write to us at [email protected] to schedule a meeting

---

 Speakers

Shawn Griffin, SVP Treasury Services, MB Financial Bank

Shawn has over 35 years of experience in the Treasury Management discipline with CCM and AAP certifications.  He has managed Operations, Client Services, Implementations, Sales, and Product Management.  He currently is responsible for the Commercial digital product strategy for the bank

Krishna Iyer, CEO, Go-Live Faster

Krishna is a CEO of Go-Live Faster, a predictive analytics firm that helps banks cut down implementation time and deliver the right user experience.  Krishna loves to innovate, evangelize and bring people together around ideas that help the industry. He co-founded Go-LIve Faster to solve an industry problem of delayed implementations. He speaks at global conferences on topics ranging machine learning to mindfulness and domains from banking to gaming

Gene Neyer, Executive Advisor, Icon Solutions

Gene Neyer advises financial and technology companies on various aspects of Payment Modernization. He is a current member of the GFFT (successor to the Fed Faster Payments Taskforce) and the president of Supplier Committee at BAFT.  Previously, Gene was a Head of Industry and Regulation for Finastra, and an SVP, Head of Product Management for D+H and Fundtech. Gene also sits on the Editorial Board of InstaPay

The landmines that are waiting to happen in your next payments implementation

Today, it’s all about faster payments! Customers are demanding near real-time payments and banks - especially in the United States - are struggling to keep up. Non-bank third-party processors find themselves in a situation where they do not have the onus of regulation or the risk that a bank needs to manage. Add a brand new payments infrastructure to this and banks are struggling to compete, and the odds are stacked against them. In the bid to compete in this faster payments world, banks are implementing new technologies at a rapid pace to uplift an ageing payments infrastructure while ensuring regulatory compliance and reduced risk to customers.

Another perspective to look at this from a bank executives mind is this:

“How do I deliver a great user experience to my customers through a near real-time payments product while meeting new regulatory requirements and ensuring that we increase fee income while doing all this?”

Sounds like a tall order, doesn’t it? Make no mistake it is - and we don’t have all the answers! We know,however,that every new payments implementation or payments system upgrade/ release is fraught with risk (just like most of these projects are) and there are landmines waiting to blow up in your next implementation/ release. Some of these that we have experience are:

Business-Related

• Wire payments pose the highest risk in a payments implementation, followed by other payment functions

• Evolving requirements and customized capabilities (that move away from the core functionality of a vendor product) introduce avoidable new risks

• Dependency and coordination of activities with third party providers of interfaces always results in delays

• Compressed QA and UAT cycles result in poor quality

• Single points of failure (one person responsible for key activities) result in schedule slippage

• Data and client migration components need special attention

Technology-Related

• Performance of payment systems is critical and test data generation for the same is fraught with issues

• Similarly generating test data for end-to-end validations can impact schedule

• Outage or data refresh in the host/back-end integrating systems results in rework

• Triaging and fixing environment issues specific to QA, PreProd, or Prod can be challenging

• Lack of environments/multiple activities being simultaneously carried out on the same environment (e.g., functional, data migration and performance testing being carried out on the same environment) can result in an activity stack up

• Interface contracting risks always exist with a payments system, given the number of systems it interacts with

 

Some of the ways in which we have experienced banks avoiding these landmines are:

• Ensure that they have enterprise-wide buy-in before embarking on a project of such nature. This includes being on the same page on scope, objectives, deliverable, responsibilities, funding and resources

• Create a fully integrated project map

• Identify key risks upfront and devise mitigation strategies

• Create realistic timelines and plan integrations early

• Establish Go-Live criteria up-front and share it with everyone involved in the project

Would love to hear some of the other experiences all of you have had. On another note, we talked about this in detail in a round-table we recently hosted at the ACI User Group conference. Please feel free to visit our Resources page to download the slides from that talk.

 

How an Integrated Payment System can transform Accounts Payable to help banks and customers

Terra-forming the payment landscape within accounts payable to keep pace with the recent accelerated technological developments in the financial industry hasn’t been easy. Why? Because despite their flaws, legacy systems and processes still get the job done. But with the prevalent environment, dallying might give your competition the chance to get a step ahead in the game. How? By using an integrated payment system.

The existing Accounts Payable scenario.

In the US, despite the advent of the Automated Clearing House (ACH) and the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) Systems, payments have been slow in their path to evolution, desperate to keep up with the metamorphosing digital payments era. And although antiquated payment approaches such as the physical checks are on a steady decline, they still see considerable usage.

The convoluted legacy payment infrastructure within a lot of banks also inadvertently adds to an already troubling problem. Complicated due to interconnected fragments such as payment types, currencies and acquired Clearing and Settlement Mechanisms (CSM), the payment landscape within banks is often tethered by its age-old legacy systems. Such a legacy payment infrastructure often limits a bank’s potential to offer a better and faster accounts payable customer experience.

Quite evidently, the amalgamation of such technological building blocks has created bottlenecks for banks in the form of spaghetti architecture.

Disadvantages of the obsolete spaghetti architecture.

With a global pandemic in play, banks and customers alike have been forced to transition to a digital model, accelerating the rate of digital adoption within the financial industry. Despite the costs associated with educating the customers, at Go-Live Faster, we believe that segueing away from the traditional to the digital will ultimately lead to a better customer experience.

As a result, complications arising from legacy payment systems have begun to stimulate a larger number of banks towards an integrated payment system. Among the several problems observed within the existing payment legacy systems, we have taken the liberty to highlight a few of the most important ones:

1. Reduced transparency in payment processes.
2. Technical breakdowns, which create further payment related problems.
3. Longer integration time frames birthed from legacy systems with obsolete enhancements.
4. The need to handle multiple file formats.
5. An unnecessarily complicated and multi-layered payment process resulting in slower transactions and reduced operational efficiency.

Such roadblocks birth the need to optimize the existing technology by modernizing the accounts payable process through an integrated payment system.

What is an Integrated Payment System?

A treasury management solution - that is what an integrated payment system effectively is. It can help streamline payment processes, reduce costs and improve operational efficiency both for a bank and its customers.

Integrated Payables are the back-end to the Accounts Payable. Through an Integrated Payments hub, banks can create a payment platform that can liaise with multiple systems. Commercial and retail banks can effectively build an omni-channel connection capable of breaking past bottlenecks presented by their legacy infrastructure.

How can an Integrated Payment System benefit a bank?

Aside from the improved operational efficiency and reduced operating expenses in the entire account payable process, some of the other key advantages of incorporating integrated payment include:

1. Increased payment transparency.
2. Higher capabilities to handle a growing volume of payments.
3. An overhaul of the existing payment system, which replaces legacy infrastructure.
4. Aggregation of data (that can be used for analytics).
5. An ease in the ability to integrate newer offerings

How can an Integrated Payment System benefit a bank’s customers?

A growing cadre of businesses are looking to improve their entire accounts payable process. Offering such a disruptive accounts payable automation enables banks to provide a holistic solution that caters to the entire accounts payable process and addresses a broad range of customer pain points such as:

1. Time and Cost saving - By providing increased transparency in payments, customers spend less time executing check runs, printing and mailing. It cuts down on the time wasted in administering processes. This translates into cost savings in the form of an efficient payment process.
2. Reduced Risk of Fraud - Most Integrated Payment systems are PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) certified. This means that they meet the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council’s requirements.
3. Greater Accuracy - By automating the accounts payable process, integrated payments eliminate human error from the equation. Fewer errors equates to fewer losses.
4. Increased cash flow - By leveraging automation in the accounts payable process, banks can reduce the payments processing turnaround. This will give their customers the opportunity to take advantage of supplier discounts.

Rather than remaining solely as a solution provider, with integrated payments, commercial and retail banks have the opportunity to become strategic partners for their customers. Providing an end-to-end accounts payable solution will drive customer loyalty. It will present a chance to banks to differentiate themselves from their competition.

When other banks approach your customers, the switching costs associated with going back to a manual accounts payable will likely deter your customers from making the switch.

Next Steps to an Integrated Payment System!

The advent of the Integrated Payables system has been a game changer for the financial industry. It is the Holy Grail that can modernize a bank’s payment infrastructure and benefit both a bank and its customers.

But tighter budgets, domain knowledge and timelines within the prevalent market scenario can make implementing integrated payments a daunting task. One way of circumventing these challenges is by partnering with a specialist such as Go-Live Faster. Go-Live Faster is a global fintech solutions firm that has helped multiple banks accelerate their product releases by making technology implementations predictable.

Our analysts understand the risks that could derail your treasury management system implementations. They are in a position to help you avoid those pitfalls, all while ensuring that you quite literally Go-Live Faster.

Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do?

PAYMENTS 2018 unites thousands of payments system stakeholders from business end-user and financial and technology services organizations to debate and explore pressing issues and opportunities. At this year’s event is the executive series presentation on ‘Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do’ by Go-Live Faster’ CEO, Krishna Iyer. Here are the session details:

Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do?

As businesses and consumers begin to demand smarter and faster payments, solutions are being developed to meet their needs. However financial institutions often come across the challenge of slower implementations that are highly detrimental in terms of time and cost. Once a financial institution has fully executed a solution, the rules of the game may have changed impacting investments and revenue growth. In a world where everything is changing so rapidly, financial institutions need to move quickly from conception to commercialization to stay ahead of the game. Faster implementations are imperative to gain competitive advantage in the current environment of fast-evolving technology and customer needs. In this session, you will hear from industry experts on what it takes to roll out faster payments, and what executives must do for faster turnaround of projects.

Join us to Discover:

• How to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to cut implementation time
• Key lessons from a case study of an accelerated complex implementation
• How to ensure your financial institution meets its predicted go-live date

 

• Date & Time:  Tuesday, May 1st | 10:15 am - 11:05 AM
• Venue: PAYMENTS 2018 | San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA.
• Request a Meeting: Write to us at [email protected] to schedule a meeting

---

 Speakers

Shawn Griffin, SVP Treasury Services, MB Financial Bank

Shawn has over 35 years of experience in the Treasury Management discipline with CCM and AAP certifications.  He has managed Operations, Client Services, Implementations, Sales, and Product Management.  He currently is responsible for the Commercial digital product strategy for the bank

Krishna Iyer, CEO, Go-Live Faster

Krishna is a CEO of Go-Live Faster, a predictive analytics firm that helps banks cut down implementation time and deliver the right user experience.  Krishna loves to innovate, evangelize and bring people together around ideas that help the industry. He co-founded Go-LIve Faster to solve an industry problem of delayed implementations. He speaks at global conferences on topics ranging machine learning to mindfulness and domains from banking to gaming

Gene Neyer, Executive Advisor, Icon Solutions

Gene Neyer advises financial and technology companies on various aspects of Payment Modernization. He is a current member of the GFFT (successor to the Fed Faster Payments Taskforce) and the president of Supplier Committee at BAFT.  Previously, Gene was a Head of Industry and Regulation for Finastra, and an SVP, Head of Product Management for D+H and Fundtech. Gene also sits on the Editorial Board of InstaPay

The landmines that are waiting to happen in your next payments implementation

Today, it’s all about faster payments! Customers are demanding near real-time payments and banks - especially in the United States - are struggling to keep up. Non-bank third-party processors find themselves in a situation where they do not have the onus of regulation or the risk that a bank needs to manage. Add a brand new payments infrastructure to this and banks are struggling to compete, and the odds are stacked against them. In the bid to compete in this faster payments world, banks are implementing new technologies at a rapid pace to uplift an ageing payments infrastructure while ensuring regulatory compliance and reduced risk to customers.

Another perspective to look at this from a bank executives mind is this:

“How do I deliver a great user experience to my customers through a near real-time payments product while meeting new regulatory requirements and ensuring that we increase fee income while doing all this?”

Sounds like a tall order, doesn’t it? Make no mistake it is - and we don’t have all the answers! We know,however,that every new payments implementation or payments system upgrade/ release is fraught with risk (just like most of these projects are) and there are landmines waiting to blow up in your next implementation/ release. Some of these that we have experience are:

Business-Related

• Wire payments pose the highest risk in a payments implementation, followed by other payment functions

• Evolving requirements and customized capabilities (that move away from the core functionality of a vendor product) introduce avoidable new risks

• Dependency and coordination of activities with third party providers of interfaces always results in delays

• Compressed QA and UAT cycles result in poor quality

• Single points of failure (one person responsible for key activities) result in schedule slippage

• Data and client migration components need special attention

Technology-Related

• Performance of payment systems is critical and test data generation for the same is fraught with issues

• Similarly generating test data for end-to-end validations can impact schedule

• Outage or data refresh in the host/back-end integrating systems results in rework

• Triaging and fixing environment issues specific to QA, PreProd, or Prod can be challenging

• Lack of environments/multiple activities being simultaneously carried out on the same environment (e.g., functional, data migration and performance testing being carried out on the same environment) can result in an activity stack up

• Interface contracting risks always exist with a payments system, given the number of systems it interacts with

 

Some of the ways in which we have experienced banks avoiding these landmines are:

• Ensure that they have enterprise-wide buy-in before embarking on a project of such nature. This includes being on the same page on scope, objectives, deliverable, responsibilities, funding and resources

• Create a fully integrated project map

• Identify key risks upfront and devise mitigation strategies

• Create realistic timelines and plan integrations early

• Establish Go-Live criteria up-front and share it with everyone involved in the project

Would love to hear some of the other experiences all of you have had. On another note, we talked about this in detail in a round-table we recently hosted at the ACI User Group conference. Please feel free to visit our Resources page to download the slides from that talk.

 

How an Integrated Payment System can transform Accounts Payable to help banks and customers

Terra-forming the payment landscape within accounts payable to keep pace with the recent accelerated technological developments in the financial industry hasn’t been easy. Why? Because despite their flaws, legacy systems and processes still get the job done. But with the prevalent environment, dallying might give your competition the chance to get a step ahead in the game. How? By using an integrated payment system.

The existing Accounts Payable scenario.

In the US, despite the advent of the Automated Clearing House (ACH) and the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) Systems, payments have been slow in their path to evolution, desperate to keep up with the metamorphosing digital payments era. And although antiquated payment approaches such as the physical checks are on a steady decline, they still see considerable usage.

The convoluted legacy payment infrastructure within a lot of banks also inadvertently adds to an already troubling problem. Complicated due to interconnected fragments such as payment types, currencies and acquired Clearing and Settlement Mechanisms (CSM), the payment landscape within banks is often tethered by its age-old legacy systems. Such a legacy payment infrastructure often limits a bank’s potential to offer a better and faster accounts payable customer experience.

Quite evidently, the amalgamation of such technological building blocks has created bottlenecks for banks in the form of spaghetti architecture.

Disadvantages of the obsolete spaghetti architecture.

With a global pandemic in play, banks and customers alike have been forced to transition to a digital model, accelerating the rate of digital adoption within the financial industry. Despite the costs associated with educating the customers, at Go-Live Faster, we believe that segueing away from the traditional to the digital will ultimately lead to a better customer experience.

As a result, complications arising from legacy payment systems have begun to stimulate a larger number of banks towards an integrated payment system. Among the several problems observed within the existing payment legacy systems, we have taken the liberty to highlight a few of the most important ones:

1. Reduced transparency in payment processes.
2. Technical breakdowns, which create further payment related problems.
3. Longer integration time frames birthed from legacy systems with obsolete enhancements.
4. The need to handle multiple file formats.
5. An unnecessarily complicated and multi-layered payment process resulting in slower transactions and reduced operational efficiency.

Such roadblocks birth the need to optimize the existing technology by modernizing the accounts payable process through an integrated payment system.

What is an Integrated Payment System?

A treasury management solution - that is what an integrated payment system effectively is. It can help streamline payment processes, reduce costs and improve operational efficiency both for a bank and its customers.

Integrated Payables are the back-end to the Accounts Payable. Through an Integrated Payments hub, banks can create a payment platform that can liaise with multiple systems. Commercial and retail banks can effectively build an omni-channel connection capable of breaking past bottlenecks presented by their legacy infrastructure.

How can an Integrated Payment System benefit a bank?

Aside from the improved operational efficiency and reduced operating expenses in the entire account payable process, some of the other key advantages of incorporating integrated payment include:

1. Increased payment transparency.
2. Higher capabilities to handle a growing volume of payments.
3. An overhaul of the existing payment system, which replaces legacy infrastructure.
4. Aggregation of data (that can be used for analytics).
5. An ease in the ability to integrate newer offerings

How can an Integrated Payment System benefit a bank’s customers?

A growing cadre of businesses are looking to improve their entire accounts payable process. Offering such a disruptive accounts payable automation enables banks to provide a holistic solution that caters to the entire accounts payable process and addresses a broad range of customer pain points such as:

1. Time and Cost saving - By providing increased transparency in payments, customers spend less time executing check runs, printing and mailing. It cuts down on the time wasted in administering processes. This translates into cost savings in the form of an efficient payment process.
2. Reduced Risk of Fraud - Most Integrated Payment systems are PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) certified. This means that they meet the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council’s requirements.
3. Greater Accuracy - By automating the accounts payable process, integrated payments eliminate human error from the equation. Fewer errors equates to fewer losses.
4. Increased cash flow - By leveraging automation in the accounts payable process, banks can reduce the payments processing turnaround. This will give their customers the opportunity to take advantage of supplier discounts.

Rather than remaining solely as a solution provider, with integrated payments, commercial and retail banks have the opportunity to become strategic partners for their customers. Providing an end-to-end accounts payable solution will drive customer loyalty. It will present a chance to banks to differentiate themselves from their competition.

When other banks approach your customers, the switching costs associated with going back to a manual accounts payable will likely deter your customers from making the switch.

Next Steps to an Integrated Payment System!

The advent of the Integrated Payables system has been a game changer for the financial industry. It is the Holy Grail that can modernize a bank’s payment infrastructure and benefit both a bank and its customers.

But tighter budgets, domain knowledge and timelines within the prevalent market scenario can make implementing integrated payments a daunting task. One way of circumventing these challenges is by partnering with a specialist such as Go-Live Faster. Go-Live Faster is a global fintech solutions firm that has helped multiple banks accelerate their product releases by making technology implementations predictable.

Our analysts understand the risks that could derail your treasury management system implementations. They are in a position to help you avoid those pitfalls, all while ensuring that you quite literally Go-Live Faster.

Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do?

PAYMENTS 2018 unites thousands of payments system stakeholders from business end-user and financial and technology services organizations to debate and explore pressing issues and opportunities. At this year’s event is the executive series presentation on ‘Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do’ by Go-Live Faster’ CEO, Krishna Iyer. Here are the session details:

Faster Implementations for Faster Payments: What Can Executives Do?

As businesses and consumers begin to demand smarter and faster payments, solutions are being developed to meet their needs. However financial institutions often come across the challenge of slower implementations that are highly detrimental in terms of time and cost. Once a financial institution has fully executed a solution, the rules of the game may have changed impacting investments and revenue growth. In a world where everything is changing so rapidly, financial institutions need to move quickly from conception to commercialization to stay ahead of the game. Faster implementations are imperative to gain competitive advantage in the current environment of fast-evolving technology and customer needs. In this session, you will hear from industry experts on what it takes to roll out faster payments, and what executives must do for faster turnaround of projects.

Join us to Discover:

• How to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to cut implementation time
• Key lessons from a case study of an accelerated complex implementation
• How to ensure your financial institution meets its predicted go-live date

 

• Date & Time:  Tuesday, May 1st | 10:15 am - 11:05 AM
• Venue: PAYMENTS 2018 | San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA.
• Request a Meeting: Write to us at [email protected] to schedule a meeting

---

 Speakers

Shawn Griffin, SVP Treasury Services, MB Financial Bank

Shawn has over 35 years of experience in the Treasury Management discipline with CCM and AAP certifications.  He has managed Operations, Client Services, Implementations, Sales, and Product Management.  He currently is responsible for the Commercial digital product strategy for the bank

Krishna Iyer, CEO, Go-Live Faster

Krishna is a CEO of Go-Live Faster, a predictive analytics firm that helps banks cut down implementation time and deliver the right user experience.  Krishna loves to innovate, evangelize and bring people together around ideas that help the industry. He co-founded Go-LIve Faster to solve an industry problem of delayed implementations. He speaks at global conferences on topics ranging machine learning to mindfulness and domains from banking to gaming

Gene Neyer, Executive Advisor, Icon Solutions

Gene Neyer advises financial and technology companies on various aspects of Payment Modernization. He is a current member of the GFFT (successor to the Fed Faster Payments Taskforce) and the president of Supplier Committee at BAFT.  Previously, Gene was a Head of Industry and Regulation for Finastra, and an SVP, Head of Product Management for D+H and Fundtech. Gene also sits on the Editorial Board of InstaPay

The landmines that are waiting to happen in your next payments implementation

Today, it’s all about faster payments! Customers are demanding near real-time payments and banks - especially in the United States - are struggling to keep up. Non-bank third-party processors find themselves in a situation where they do not have the onus of regulation or the risk that a bank needs to manage. Add a brand new payments infrastructure to this and banks are struggling to compete, and the odds are stacked against them. In the bid to compete in this faster payments world, banks are implementing new technologies at a rapid pace to uplift an ageing payments infrastructure while ensuring regulatory compliance and reduced risk to customers.

Another perspective to look at this from a bank executives mind is this:

“How do I deliver a great user experience to my customers through a near real-time payments product while meeting new regulatory requirements and ensuring that we increase fee income while doing all this?”

Sounds like a tall order, doesn’t it? Make no mistake it is - and we don’t have all the answers! We know,however,that every new payments implementation or payments system upgrade/ release is fraught with risk (just like most of these projects are) and there are landmines waiting to blow up in your next implementation/ release. Some of these that we have experience are:

Business-Related

• Wire payments pose the highest risk in a payments implementation, followed by other payment functions

• Evolving requirements and customized capabilities (that move away from the core functionality of a vendor product) introduce avoidable new risks

• Dependency and coordination of activities with third party providers of interfaces always results in delays

• Compressed QA and UAT cycles result in poor quality

• Single points of failure (one person responsible for key activities) result in schedule slippage

• Data and client migration components need special attention

Technology-Related

• Performance of payment systems is critical and test data generation for the same is fraught with issues

• Similarly generating test data for end-to-end validations can impact schedule

• Outage or data refresh in the host/back-end integrating systems results in rework

• Triaging and fixing environment issues specific to QA, PreProd, or Prod can be challenging

• Lack of environments/multiple activities being simultaneously carried out on the same environment (e.g., functional, data migration and performance testing being carried out on the same environment) can result in an activity stack up

• Interface contracting risks always exist with a payments system, given the number of systems it interacts with

 

Some of the ways in which we have experienced banks avoiding these landmines are:

• Ensure that they have enterprise-wide buy-in before embarking on a project of such nature. This includes being on the same page on scope, objectives, deliverable, responsibilities, funding and resources

• Create a fully integrated project map

• Identify key risks upfront and devise mitigation strategies

• Create realistic timelines and plan integrations early

• Establish Go-Live criteria up-front and share it with everyone involved in the project

Would love to hear some of the other experiences all of you have had. On another note, we talked about this in detail in a round-table we recently hosted at the ACI User Group conference. Please feel free to visit our Resources page to download the slides from that talk.