The challenge
Our client offers a comprehensive range of financial services to both retail and corporate customers. To enhance its cross-border payments offering, the bank has partnered with a third-party technology vendor to deliver efficient and cost effective cross-border payment services across its network. The objective is to provide a consistent and seamless customer experience while simplifying and optimising the underlying IT landscape.
With the project already underway, our client needed to conduct a relatively short and focussed engagement to assess the impact on three core capabilities required to support cross-border payments. The goal was to ensure a consistent and standardised approach across network banks. Historically, each network bank embarked on its own solution, resulting in duplication of efforts and inconsistencies across markets. The three capabilities in scope were:
- Beneficiary management
- Foreign Exchange (FX) rates
- Billing and pricing
The objective of the engagement was to design reusable business services that provide consistent solutions across markets, increasing reusability and applying best practices across the organisation.
The approach
The outcomes of the engagement were shaped by close collaboration with our client’s cross-border payments product team.
This collaboration provided clarity on the objectives of the project and facilitated engagement with network banks to understand existing user journeys and capabilities. These insights were then analysed and incorporated into the design of the target capabilities.
The engagement was delivered over a four-week period using a three-stage approach that involved:
- Initiation and scoping: planning and defining timelines for deliverables, analysing existing materials, and designing a questionnaire to help network banks prepare for upcoming workshops
- Engaging with network banks: analysing responses from network banks and conducting workshops to walk through current customer journeys, focussing on the three key capabilities identified
- Observations and recommendations: a context diagram was developed to outline key interactions between business domains; Icon also assessed both business and technical considerations for each capability
Solutions and benefits
- Beneficiary management
- Foreign Exchange
- Pricing and billing
Across each of the three business areas that were defined by the cross-border
product team, Icon delivered the following solutions and benefits:
Beneficiary management:
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Analysis of business and technical design considerations, including both current gaps and future requirements: the solution aimed to enhance customer experience, improve data quality, and reduce fraud by supporting industry initiatives such as Confirmation of Payee (CoP/VoP)
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Design of a conceptual data model based on the ISO 20022 pacs.008 message structure
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Analysis of three options for defining beneficiary relationships, evaluating each for user experience, implementation complexity, and data storage
FX:
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Although the payments organisation is a consumer of Foreign Exchange (FX) capabilities, Icon analysed a number of scenarios required to support cross-border payments
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Assisted the business in identifying the use cases best placed to support traditional rails versus those to be routed via our client’s third-party technology platform
Pricing and billing:
- Review of the required billing and pricing features to ensure the solution
- Supports cross-border payments for both retail and corporate customers
- Delivery of a design supporting flexible rules, customer-specific rates, and discount structures
This engagement highlights how Icon’s collaborative approach empowers small teams to deliver highly impactful results.By defining a future-ready blueprint that balances today’s needs with tomorrow’s demands, our client can develop a target solution that delivers consistency and enables reusability across its cross-border payments network.
Hussam Kamel
Payments Architect, Icon Solutions
Our unique contribution
Icon brings deep payments expertise spanning payment transformation, modernisation, and the implementation of payment orchestration and processing. This expertise, along with Icon’s library of payment assets and accelerators, enabled a small team of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to deliver significant value in a short time frame.
The engagement identified key design considerations essential to the development of a target solution, not only addressing today’s requirements but also outlining a future-proof, flexible design. This has provided our client with a blueprint that promotes best practices, maximises reusability across network banks, and demonstrates a clear path to develop and avoid potential delivery bottlenecks.
