2023/24 recap: setting the stage for innovation and growth
To mark the publication of Icon’s 2024 Annual Report co-founders Darren Capehorn, Ben Hallifax and Tom Kelleher, explore the key company milestones that have positioned Icon for its next phase of global growth.
Despite the industry impact of various macro-economic factors in 2023-24, the commitment shown by our team to delivering excellence means Icon maintained its strong performance.
This allowed us to invest in keeping our customers at the forefront of payments transformation through our product, IPF, and the work of our Services team.
Our goal is always about empowering customers to develop and implement the right solution for their business, free of vendor dependency. As a result, Icon continued to strengthen its customer footprint across the UK and EMEA; signing a major new bank as a customer in North America, and winning new projects with existing clients, including Citi and NatWest.
Forging true partnerships with Citi and NatWest
Expanding our partnerships with Citi and NatWest was a major milestone for the company in 2023-24.
In September 2023, NatWest selected IPF to accelerate its payments modernisation programme. This was followed in December 2023 by Citi expanding its use of IPF to enhance its micro-services orchestration architecture, as part of its own multi-year payments platform modernisation.
Both Citi and NatWest also made strategic investments in Icon, with executives from each organisation joining our Board of Directors. This is an endorsement of the current strength of the business and demonstrates Icon’s success in developing meaningful and effective relationships with our customers.
An unwavering commitment to people and purpose
Over the past 12 months we are proud that our support of charitable initiatives has also remained steadfast.
Giving back to the community is a big part of Icon’s identity and in 2023-24 our team raised over £100,000 for charitable causes.
This is alongside our continued support of grassroot initiatives. In addition to our ongoing work with Haverstock School and Digital Futures, we have established a new partnership with the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) to champion careers, diversity and inclusion in IT.
New IPF product features and updates
In terms of our technology capabilities, investments have been made to enhance the functionality of IPF – an ISO 20022 and cloud-native technology framework used by banks that want to accelerate their payments transformation.
In 2023-24, we launched new IPF scheme packs for SIC5 and FedNow; helping customers balance instant payments scheme compliance and ISO 20022 migration with strategic innovation and cost-cutting priorities.
Other key updates include joining the Amazon Partner Network and achieving ‘Qualified Software’ status. This will help more banks to leverage the benefits of a cloud-native architecture to build secure, resilient, scalable and flexible applications. Icon also launched a new programme for client and partner System Integrator (SI) engineers to become IPF accredited.
Helping customers to steer and deliver technology transformation
Alongside IPF, our Services team has continued to help banks and financial institutions globally to steer and deliver technology transformation, in response to elevated customer demands, evolving regulatory requirements, and inevitable cost pressures.
Some of the notable projects delivered by our Services team this past year include:
- Helping a Tier 1 UK banks to achieve a seamless migration to ISO 20022 for anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions screening
- Providing strategy, roadmap and architectural support to help a leading UK Insurance, Wealth and Retirement provider accelerate its ambitious technology transformation programme
- Defining agile, scalable and consistent target architectures to help a global Tier 1 bank transform its payments and FX services.
Embracing innovation and sharing expertise
In tandem, Icon continues to explore and provide guidance on the strategic and technical implications of new technologies.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has been a key focus in 2023-24, with Icon developing its own GenAI capabilities and researching “copilot” type solutions. This has included working with our partner, MongoDB, and Celent to publish a new research report exploring the opportunities and benefits of using AI in payments.
Elsewhere, our Payments Centre of Excellence (CoE) continues to publish important insights and research to promote awareness and understanding of key trends including AI and instant / real-time payments. You can find these on our Insights hub here.
Setting the stage for innovation and growth in 2024-25
Since Icon was founded in 2009, we have continued to strengthen our unique market position as a payments company that delivers true solutions for clients by combining strategy, product, and services.
We are now ideally positioned to realise significant new opportunities for IPF across Europe, the U.S. and Canada, and also see emerging growth levers in other key regions and non-banking sectors.
This will be complemented and augmented by IPF. Our engineering team is busy working on new features and modules to further help banks address risks and capitalise on new opportunities. We are also re-focusing our service offering on the core competencies that directly support IPF delivery and meet emerging client needs.
Finally, and as we look towards the year ahead, we want to take pause and extend a sincere thank you to our team, clients and partners for their ongoing commitment to simplifying payments transformation.
Icon Solutions