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.

 

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.