Takeaways from Icon’s US payments conference

This month Icon hosted its annual payments conference in New York.

The event provided a forum for our customers and other payments professionals to exchange ideas, share learnings and explore the commercial opportunities, and potential roadblocks, that are presenting as the U.S. continues its move to real-time.

Demonstrating a customer-centric approach to innovation

At Icon, we are committed to working with our clients to make their journey with IPF – and Icon – a success. Part of that commitment to collaboration comes through events like our annual payments conference which provides a great opportunity to bring our clients together and have an honest and open exchange on payments market vision, IPF roadmap & technology advancements.

We heard about our client’s experiences and our team shared some insights from on how next-generation technologies are being applied in payments to improve services, streamline operations, reduce costs and generate new revenue streams and discussing challenges, helps us all move forward.

While success looks different for every client, we are constantly working to ensure that IPF works for all our clients and helps them deliver against their goals. That’s why our clients play a key role in shaping the development and delivery of the Icon Payments Framework (IPF) product roadmap. In New York, we invited customers to share how they are getting the most from IPF and bring forward their requirements for the product roadmap.

Exploring the strategic and technical implications of real-time in North America

As Icon continues to strengthen its footprint in North America, we hosted our event in New York this year to connect with U.S. clients in person and share first-hand how IPF can be used to address the demands of real-time payments specifically.

As part of the day, I was joined by great speakers from three leading U.S. banks for a panel discussion that explored the strategies and technologies banks are adopting to capitalise on real-time payment growth.

Amongst many things, the panel highlighted Request for Payment as one of the main use cases driving adoption. With The Clearing House (TCH) and FedNow both including support for this service, Request for Payment is one of the key areas currently where real business value can be generated, with invoicing and payments reconciliation recognised as some of the leading emerging use-cases.

It also shed a light on challenges specific to the U.S. market. Thankfully – for Icon – real-time payments are seen as worth every penny of investment (a whopping 72% of the audience agreed, while no one disagreed), although a lack of interoperability between TCH’s and FedNow’s real-time payment rails risks being an obstacle to future growth. In response, many banks are recognising the value of payments convergence as a way to address the cost and complexity of technical integration. A bit of a shock came to the panel when the audience indicated to believe that we will see global real time payments as the norm by 2030. Let’s see. But most important: Throughout the panel, we heard examples of how banks plan to – and are – working with Icon and to consolidate the processing of real-time payments into single solutions that are agnostic to payment type, currency, scheme and clearing settlement mechanisms.

All in all, a great day and looking forward to the next one.

On behalf of Icon, I would like to thank everyone that was able to join us in New York for our annual payments conference. We hope you enjoyed the event and keep an eye out for further information which we will be sharing soon about an upcoming virtual conference happening in June.

If you would like to hear more about IPF, or book a demo, please get in touch.